Stella Days (Thaddeus O'Sullivan, 2012)

Thaddeus O'Sullivan's Stella Days is pianissimo drama about an old Irish priest and his muted sorrow that gets so bogged down on its vague sense of misery that even the promise of cinema's wonder cannot inject some life into the movie. Martin Sheen is, as ever, charismatic, but all he does is morosely shuffle about a Tipperary village, getting into a watered-down, inoffensive spin on the highly contentious conflict of religious and secular values. Potentially intriguing subplots, such as the politician so devout he all but openly runs for Sheen's priesthood as much as any office, occasionally surface, but they neither develop nor fade into an atmospheric miasma that the best works of Irish discontent conjure.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

The Amazing Spider-Man (Marc Webb, 2012)

Marc Webb's The Amazing Spider-Man would be a decent movie if it had nothing to do with comic books. When left to his own devices, Andrew Garfield gives Peter Parker an agreeably sardonic side, at once cocky and anxious as he spits out the quips sorely missing from Sam Raimi's post-9/11-tinged idealism. Garfield even enjoys ample chemistry with his leading lady, Emma Stone, which is a nice change of pace, not merely from Raimi's films but the superhero genre as a whole. Were the film nothing more than a slightly surreal abstraction of pimply and emotional hormone changes, it would make a fine romantic comedy powered by believable actors doing above-average work.


But this is a Spider-Man film, and the hormonal abstract in question concerns Parker's superpowers, which themselves entail a narrative arc of responsibility that generates the greatest tension of Parker's life. A good Spider-Man story is less about the fight between Spidey and the chosen villain than how his constant quest for a normal, happy life must be sacrificed for the greater civic good. That tension is wholly lacking in Webb's version, which recalls Green Lantern in its cynical rewrite of a noble character into a self-absorbed narcissist who always makes sure to hedge his bets on even the most tentative of mature actions so he ultimately emerges the same erratic jackass at the end of the film he was at the top.

Steven Spielberg: Catch Me if You Can

The brilliant opening credits of Catch Me if You Can encapsulate the spirit and tenor of the film to follow with magnificent conciseness. Animated with the use of rubber stamps (an ingenious technique that only further ties the credits to the content of the actual movie), Olivier Kuntzel's and Florence Deygas' title design renders Spielberg's most delicate film into a brief summary of plot and direction. The credits have a tremendous flow and momentum to them, the words forming in elegant typography, lines always continuing until they form the next credit. The animation has the same unceasing inertia, with the frame shifting horizontally and vertically as the stamped silhouette of Frank William Abagnale, Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio) evades FBI Agent Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks). Buoyed by John Williams' own '60s throwback, a light but still dramatic score, these first minutes are so memorable that I recalled them instantly after not seeing the film in years, while so much of the actual story had faded.

Watching Catch Me if You Can again, however, made me wonder how I'd let it sink in my estimation. It's an undeniably light work, perhaps Spielberg's lightest since The Sugarland Express, his first theatrical film. But it's also the first of his movies since then to truly work as a comedy, to still operate on the formal, large scale of his typical work but also generate character-driven, intimate humor woefully absent in, say, 1941. So delicate is Spielberg's craft here, so unlike his typical populist stylist of overwhelming spectacle, that it can be easy to miss that the film, like The Sugarland Express, is actually a drama. In fact, it may be the most elegant summary of some of Spielberg's pet themes of childhood innocence and distanced parenthood. That it is so funny only reveals frustratingly unexplored depths to Spielberg's storytelling capacity.

The West Wing — Season 7

After losing track of what made the characters of The West Wing so memorable, John Wells found a way to fix the show: just make as many new characters as possible, and focus on them instead. It was a bold gambit, but one that paid off handsomely, turning a horribly staid program into something that actually approached the old energy that used to roll off it effortlessly. One could see the transition in the quality dips the sixth season took when it returned to the White House after breaking from the campaign trail.

Happily, the writers understood what worked best about the sixth season, and the vast majority of the show's final season excels, ironically, by all but entirely abandoning its previous episodes. The White House where the show made its home for six years suddenly becomes the abstract that we typically view the president's home as: for all the sunny idealism, the other seasons de-romanticized and made concrete 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Now, it exists as the goal for Sen. Arnold Vinick (Alan Alda) and Rep. Matt Santos (Jimmy Smits), the prize for besting the other in the presidential race.

In Vinick and Santos, we have evenly matched -- intellectually and morally -- nominees, an ideal situation for an audience who has only ever known one clear frontrunner (even if that person lost) and a joke of a human being. The West Wing itself already played into this idea by projecting frustrations with George Bush by setting up a caricature of him to go against Bartlet's reelection bid. It was a farcical bit of plotting -- not least because the least offensive aspect of Bush was his intelligence, which took a distant back seat to his corporate cronyism and penchant for declaring war crimes legal -- but it was oddly familiar. Vinick and Santos offer the possibility for a different kind of campaign one that works on rhetoric but actually addresses the issues in a substantive way.

For the first part of the season, Vinick and Santos solidify their positions. With the Vinick the clear frontrunner for having no serious competition for his nomination, he gets the majority of press coverage, but that also brings more scrutiny. His socially liberal views -- pro-choice, hands-off the issue of gay marriage -- win him independents but sorely cost him among the Religious Right that has taken over the Republican Party. Still, with the Democrats disorganized from the tight primary race and Bartlet having proved how successfully a president could cross the aisle without watering down his achievements, Vinick could steal away liberal voters.

With Santos trailing, Josh scrambles to find ways to boost his candidate's profile. Vinick changes the election strategy: his home state is California, making Democrats fight for a major state they typically assume will go to them, and his socially liberal policies allow voters who might have been alienated by religious pandering to consider a conservative. Santos brings in a media consultant, Louise Thorton (Janeane Garofolo), and for all their head-butting, Josh and Lou line up on most issues except the policy of negative ads. The public loves them, but they also hypocritically look down on the first nominee to slam the other. Lou knows that a slash-and-burn policy will give them such gains that the fickle tut-tutting of the electorate will fade quickly, but Josh sticks to conventional wisdom.

But then, nothing about Santos lines up with conventional wisdom. He may have the onus of proving himself, but he actually has it easy compared to Vinick, who makes gains in states that would almost never consider a Republican but also begins slipping in the strong block of Southern voters. Santos, then, has the luxury of making his own image without pressure from a major section of party supporters.

As with Obama, Santos sidesteps the negativity (and the negativity leveled at him) and targets the vein of betrayed optimism the voters always feel. Constantly vexing Josh and Lou by managing to say the least politically nonthreatening thing, Santos then sends their jaws to the floor again when he works his way out of the pit, delivering a speech that clarifies his stance until those most opposed are cowed and those on the fence are turned into wild believers. The biggest issue facing him is a racial one; just as Obama must tiptoe around any racial component to come across his desk, so too must Santos delicately handle the subject of a black teen shot by a Latino cop. But he finds a way to avoid defining himself as just "the Latino nominee" with a speech at the boy's funeral that avoids finger-pointing and finds a way to push for greater understanding without turning a young man's death into an excuse for a "Kumbaya."

Undoubtedly the centerpiece of the campaign storyline is "The Debate," which NBC aired live on the east and west coasts. Half-ingenious, half-unbearably awkward, "The Debate" strives for the feel of a real debate but breaks from the format instantly to let the nominees speak directly to each other and have an actual discussion rather than a regurgitation of talking points. When Alda and Smits get into, they are brilliantly, but everything surrounding them is just a haphazard ratings stunt, and the flimsy construction threatens to undo the episode before the two actors rescue it once more. Besides, the episode does succeed in painting a clear portrait of where the two split on their positions and how they approach each issue.

If Vinick and Santos look like equally valid choices to the show's audience, they also look like that way to the voters in The West Wing's diegesis, and the election comes down to a hair. Vinick manages to talk his way out of a near-meltdown of a nuclear plant he firmly supported by somehow promoting the virtues of nuclear energy when people are in a panic, salvaging an event that should have delivered the presidency to Santos in a hand basket. Santos, on the other hand, continues to prove himself, and he even gets the Republican on national security as he's still a reserve pilot in the Marines.

The rise of Santos makes up for the slow spiral of the Bartlet administration, which features majorly in episodes that suck the life out of the main storyline. Bartlet's middle daughter gets married, leading to a farcical in-White House wedding that fails as levity against the severity of the campaign and only exacerbates the lazy rewriting of most of the original cast into parodies of their former selves. Furthermore, the writers attempt to capitalize on the Valerie Plame scandal by introducing a White House leak of their own. But because this is Bartlet and not that pampered puppet who ceded control of the presidency to Dick Cheney, the leak goes from a petulant burning of a CIA operative as revenge against her anti-Iraq husband to a much more understandable release of information. With a group of astronauts stranded in space with dwindling oxygen, someone in the West Wing leaks knowledge of a secret military space plane that frees it up to be used in a rescue by removing the secret. There are military considerations, sure, but none on the level of blacklisting an intelligence agent and putting her sources in jeopardy. Many would sympathize with the decision, cutting out a great deal of dramatic weight when the person responsible -- or at least the person who confesses -- should be seen as a hero.

When election day nears, The West Wing hits a frenzied note that rivals the chaos of the most bewildering and tense moments of the show's early days. The strain of too many firm handshakes gives Vinick a hairline fracture, while sleep deprivation has Santos so on-edge he nearly snaps at his family with a sea of cameras nearby. The real life death of John Spencer forces the writers to deal with Leo McGarry, and an already tight election night compounds when Annabeth discovers his body in a hotel room before the polls close in Western states. The tension is unbearable, and when the final state pushes one nominee over the top, the results are not so much triumphant but relieving. At last, we can get some sleep, even if the characters can't.

That's the fatalistic humor of the last third of the show's season: after fighting so hard to get the presidency, the Santos crew now has to immediately start planning his first term. This should not come as a surprise, given that we spent years watching people like Josh frantically pace around the White House working for a sitting president, but the election proved so dramatically satisfying after the bloat of the rest of the Wells years (and even the end-run of Sorkin's time on the show) that it's shocking to remember that now the real work begins.

And so, the last days of The West Wing run out in quiet yet tireless terms, with the characters preparing for the next major shift and emotional closure amazingly coming from people who seemingly ran out of dramatic meaning long ago. The writers bring back long-lost characters like Sam Seaborn to show just how far the series has progressed, and without wishing to keep beating this horse, I wondered if the sudden welling of emotion I felt in the last few episodes was what I was supposed to feel with Lost's final hours. Though John Wells and some of his new writers seemingly did everything in their power to ruin the cast we came to know and love, they manage to achieve an elegiac view of the show as a whole. I may not have felt as deeply about Charlie, C.J. or Toby personally as I might had the series ended with its fourths season, but I felt an overall sense of loss leaving the Bartlet White House, and the tinge of desire I had to stick with Santos came with the understanding that it was better to let go. The West Wing allowed us all to imagine a world free of Bush during its run, but by the end, the allegory disappears and I was left mourning the show's loss and its loss alone.

The West Wing — Season 6

After the mediocre (at best) fifth season expanded on the worst aspects of Sorkin's time on the show -- overblown storylines, optimism that verged on reality blindness -- and combined them with a sudden lack of clearly defined direction and an inability to maintain a dramatic arc. The new showrunner, John Wells, fumbled the admittedly ludicrous but dramatically tense finale of the fourth season and he spent the rest of the season trying to recover. Eventually, they found themselves in the same position as the last year, with a finale that sacrificed logic for a desperate grab for suspense.

If the central issue of the fifth season was the sudden upswing in major political problems being wrapped up with stupefying expediency, the sixth season of The West Wing hardly inspires much confidence for a return to the unrealistic but at least vaguely plausible political dealing of the show's early years. Setting a new high for Jed Bartlet's capacity as a groundbreaking leader and a new low for understanding of the complexities of international tensions, the writers use the first two episodes to -- I am not kidding -- solve the bitter struggle between Palestine and Israel. There is some small measure taken to acknowledge how absurd this is and how difficult a peace would be to ensure, but after only a few episodes, even the matter of U.S. peacekeepers sent to monitor the situation cease to rate a mention. It is yet another embarrassing development for a show that seems at this point capable only of making plainly clear the thin line between sharply written off-reality and stilted, cockeyed idealism.

But diffusing one of the world's most dangerous time bombs thankfully does not set a precedent for superhuman achievements on Bartlet's part. Instead, it captures, or at least attempts to capture, the uncertainty of a lame-duck session. After winning reelection despite the massive controversy of lying about his multiple sclerosis and then resigning his post for a brief time to hunt for his daughter without emotionally compromising the position of the most powerful man in the world, Bartlet suddenly finds himself staring down his biggest challenge: retirement.

Unfortunately, the ennui and mounting sense of regret for policies left undone spreads to the pacing of the season. The first half of the season drags so badly I feel as if I could have watched two seasons of the show's early years in the same time span. Compounding Bartlet's feelings of being trapped in the office is the blatant metaphor of a sudden onset of advanced MS symptoms, leaving Bartlet paralyzed for a time and wearied for the rest of the episodes. Had this occurred sooner, the paralysis would have carried weight, impeding his bold plans for bettering America. Instead, it only exacerbates the feelings of aimlessness, miring the series in a loop that works like so: Bartlet discusses fatigue, Abigail begins edging into decision-making in full-on Edith Wilson mode, the staff gently grumbles about not doing anything, and everyone misses Leo, who had a hear attack, because why not?

Whatever shrewdness might have motivated the writers to suddenly scale back the sense of accomplishment and fire to the Bartlet administration, this exaggerated nonsense makes the already struggling series unbearable. One episode, involving Bartlet accidentally accepting the flag of the Taiwanese independence movement mere hours before he must deal with the Chinese on economic and diplomatic issues, manages to rival the badness of the fifth season's gimmick episode "Access" by simply being bad within canon. In some ways, that's even worse than "Access." (And what the hell was with that officious, and nonsensically British, guy down in archives?). Another story of note includes Josh lightly hitting a Prius while test-driving a gas-guzzling SUV, setting off the dumbest media frenzy in the history of Beltway echo-chamber frenzies. This laziness can be seen all over the place, even in minor details such as dragging Lily Tomlin out on location for the Camp David episode and giving her no lines.

Then, something miraculous happens: The West Wing rights itself, and in a wholly unexpected way. Rather than attempt to find that old spark, the writers finally understand that, after five seasons of dramatic arcs and single-episode issues, the show simply has nothing left to say about the Bartlet administration. Instead, Wells and co. turn their attention to the next generation of politics, splitting focus between drudging White House-centric episodes and vibrant, intriguing and rewarding looks at the campaign trail for the Democrats seeking not only to secure the presidential nomination.

Previously, presidential elections on The West Wing were covered primarily through flashbacks of the staffers coming to Bartlet's original campaign. But those episodes concerned what it was about Bartlet that made the characters decide to throw their time and effort behind the then-governor. Here, the writers focus on the nitty-gritty of the campaign trail, treating the mad house that is the election cycle with the same meticulous, if exaggerated, detail with which Aaron Sorkin plotted the inner workings of the White House through the staff, back before most of these decisions were filtered through the broader prism of the president's involvement.

The desire for the staffers to continue working leads to an ideological split: some stay with Bartlet to try and ensure that his last year is as productive and meaningful as his first seven, while others head out to find the next major player. John Hoynes, the disgraced ex-vice president, feels enough time has lapsed from his public scandal to consider a run, especially since his only real competition is Bob Russell, current VP and target for every joke about dumb politicians that people have saved up since Dan Quayle disappeared from the public eye. Will Bailey, who already aligned himself with Russell when he spotted the shrewd politician underneath the bumbling facade, becomes the vice president's primary campaign adviser in addition to being chief of staff. Donna, as fed up with the drawn-out sexual tension with Josh as the show's audience, also jumps onto Russell's campaign.

But the most interesting development is Josh's decision to hunt down a Texan congressman who had been considering retiring from public service while still young to effect more direct change at home. Matt Santos (Jimmy Smits) has no aspirations to run, but Josh's dealings with the representative nag at him until he heads to Texas to convince Santos to run. For the remainder of the season, Josh toils to make his candidate look like more than a joke as more and more come to believe he's running Santos just to split votes from Russell to benefit Hoynes, his boss before Josh jumped onto Bartlet's ship.

The writers based Santos on then-Senator Barack Obama, and it's remarkable how prescient his campaign is: an also-ran against presumptive front-runners, Santos slowly gains ground when he sticks to pushing issues instead of getting bogged down in the usual attacks (remember when Obama's unwillingness to stay on the offensive was a sign of integrity and not a routinely disappointing display of his reluctance to stand by his beliefs?). His unexpected rise throws the Democratic caucus into pandemonium, preventing a clear choice for nomination when the Republicans immediately fall behind Sen. Arnold Vinick of California (Alan Alda).

At last, The West Wing returns to gripping television. Both the confusing nature of the Democratic situation and the plans of the Vinick campaign make for fascinating stories. Part of this, of course, can be attributed to the actors. Jimmy Smits has always struck me as an actor I shouldn't like until he unloads a heap of talent while you're not paying attention. He looks as if acting excites him more than anything, like a boy wondering onto a set in the middle of classic Hollywood and managing to get on-screen. I almost expect him to stop in whatever performance he's giving and wave "hello" to his mother at the camera, and that eternal, endearing boyishness makes him magnetic. When he combines that with the conviction of belief he brings to Santos, I couldn't take my eyes off him, and I noticed more about this actor I adore than I ever had previously. His physicality matches his acting style: slight pockmarks lay off the side of his still-youthful face, adding a hint of wisdom and calm to his enthusiasm. When Santos walks around New Hampshire before the primaries, insisting on discussing policy instead of simply hunting photo-ops with average citizens, he still comes off as the most likable of the candidates.

At the other end is Alda, whose casting as the Republican senator only compounds the unlikelihood of Vinick's complexity. Not only do the writers at last come up with a conservative character who does not serve as a punching bag for our pent-up frustrations with Bush et al., they picked one of Hollywood's most committed liberals to play him. While Santos struggles to stand by his idealism as Josh attempts to soften him, Vinick has the voice of authority of a longtime politician, sticking to his guns even when it could cost him among the conservative base. His commitment to hands-off policy causes him to butt heads with social conservatives on issues like abortion, and his religious doubts lead him to denounce his castigation among the press for not attending church regularly. Perhaps it is a byproduct of The West Wing's tangential relationship to reality, but Vinick's more libertarian policies actually sound as if they could work. Modeled loosely after Barry Goldwater, Vinick lacks his inspiration's hawkish qualities but shares a commitment to fiscal conservatism over the Religious Right and an unwillingness to simplify or soften his message for the sake of easily digestible rhetoric. If Santos comes off as a man of the people, a young gun who can connect seemingly with anyone even if his beliefs clash with his or hers, Vinick emits an authoritative tone, fatherly without being patriarchal.

The caliber of these two candidates makes for riveting television, taking Bartlet's magnetism and splitting between two completely opposed but respectful men. Though the sixth season deals with the tension among Democrats as the race for nomination is too close to call even heading into the Democratic National Conference, one instantly hopes that the final race will pit Vinick against Santos, for the two of them continue to display such honesty that I would set aside any hopes for truly realistic politics just to see what it might be like if two candidates would conduct themselves honorably and truthfully. So enraptured was I by the pair of them that I never stopped to consider that, in real life, we finally got one such candidate in the last presidential cycle, only for him to sorely disappoint on many of the core issues that defined the courage of his beliefs.

If Santos brought up the Barack Obama connection openly, the end days of Bartlet's administration blurred the line of who might best embody our current president. Though Bartlet is entering his final year of a second term having accomplished much, the single year we see in this season mirrors the two Obama has presided over since taking office: Bartlet is besieged by compromise and regret, unable to get anything past a partisan Congress (though at least Bartlet has the decency to be gridlocked by a Republican majority and not a small but militant minority), and idealism takes a back seat to politicking. If the writers called Obama's meteoric rise three years ahead of time, they also anticipated the cynicism that would take foot when certain things beyond the leader's control spiraled out of control and some of the policies he enacted to right them only made matters worse. After suffering through a season I originally pegged as mediocre but not entirely terrible before revising my opinion to something even less positive, I needed to see this shift from dragging plots to ahead-of-the-curve projection. Though it appears as if The West Wing will never return to its original format before its finale in the next season, I no longer mind. By changing course, it saved itself, and I can at last look forward to completing a series that instantly leaped into the high reaches of my favorite programs when I dove into its mesmerizing early seasons so long ago.

The West Wing — Season 5

In all fairness to John Wells, the executive producer/showrunner of ER whose production company launched The West Wing, no one could have taken over for Aaron Sorkin after he and director Thomas Schlamme acrimoniously departed the series at the end of its fourth season. Now, the idea that Sorkin, who placed his name (and usually only his name) on 85 of the first four seasons' 88 episodes, really was the exclusive writer is horseshit. However, even if he really did, Sorkin's biggest impact on those who would have to fill his shoes came in the form of the previous season's finale, a grandiose, gripping cliffhanger that plunged the show into an emotional and political mire that posed a number of deep conundrums between the necessity for the leaders of state to be objective and reasoned and their status as actual human beings, subject to fear, rashness and, most importantly, potentially compromised by human connections.

With Bartlet invoking the 25th Amendment in the wake of his youngest daughter's kidnapping, the president surrendered his position in order to divorce his personal reactions from the power afforded to the leader of the country. It was a humbling display of civic responsibility and personal willpower, even for a fictional character, and with Republican Glenn Allen Walken (John Goodman) immediately taking control, Sorkin ran out of the White House cackling to himself, placing our beloved fake president at the end of his wits, forcing the country to handle a terror attack (and thus raising issues of America's culpability for its covert ops) and even saddling the staffers with a dyed-in-the-wool conservative to add insult to injury. You could practically hear him shout, "Deal with this, fuckers!" as the credits ran.

So, how does Wells, his new head director Alex Graves, and the whole West Wing cast and crew deal with Zoey's kidnapping and the myriad of issues it raised? Why, they solve everything in two episodes. Oh, boy. Narratively, these two episodes are fairly taut, maintaining the tension of the situation as a far more hawkish leader considers which target to annihilate in response to the kidnapping, even if a fast retaliation could get Zoey killed. But even in these strong openers, the seeds for the season's downgrading present themselves: obviously The West Wing is a politically oriented show, but the sight of Toby and Josh launching immediately into political scheming to combat their fears of what Walken might do if the situation drags on robs both of a baseline of humanity that they'd previously shown. For the rest of the season, both characters stretch their always outspoken political concerns and machinations into garish shapes; Wells actually makes the Republicans out to be both morally and intellectually superior to Josh and Toby by refusing to campaign on the perception of Bartlet as too weak to govern out of respect and simple pragmatism (assaulting a man whose daughter just got kidnapped would sink a platform faster than video of a sexual affair).

Perhaps Wells meant that, however, as the fifth season moves away from Sorkin's unabashed liberal optimism into the murky waters of bipartisanship. That shift makes the political angle of show more realistic than ever, and more attuned to the current climate, but Wells uses simple compromise ostensibly to solve major ideological issues. By mixing Republican and Democratic ideas, The West Wing "fixes" Social Security, finds a way to nominate highly partisan Supreme Court justices without watering down experience and passion in favor of safe picks and compares the burst-bubble recession to a bagel for facile explanation and solution proposals.

One could certainly argue for the need for moderation in government, but if just rule simply meant the combination of semi-opposing ideas, wouldn't we have figured everything out by now? Say what you will about the inefficiency of Congress, but I cannot imagine that pure stubbornness could have sustained a system that refused to progress for the sake of saving face beyond a decade (well, maybe two). As we can see now, bipartisanship too often waters down legislation, packing bills so full of concessions that potentially major reform is reduced to something scarcely distinguishable from the current system. This change in the show's tone clashes openly with its own previous aversion to bipartisan politics, with Bartlet's assertion that intense debate produced better leadership than instant compromise. After a time, I began to even soften toward Toby and Josh's hard line against even considering the other side, arrogant as it was, because it showed a backbone the rest of the season lacked. Consider that episode involving the Supreme Court nominations: as easy, too easy, as its solution was, "The Supremes" was easily the most Sorkin-esque episode of the season because it showed two highly opinionated judges bettering their arguments and deepening their mutual respect through constant bickering.

Everything else, though, is too simplified. Within the context of the rest of the fourth season, Zoey's kidnapping prompted an examination of this country's indignation at action taken against us in response to economic and military forces we use to hobble or fund various regimes. Quite rightly, Americans responded to 9/11 with anger, but the question of why we were attacked quickly disappeared with assurances that our "freedom" inspired hatred instead of lingering Cold War foreign politics that place troops and influence where indigenous populations don't want it. I do not expect a television drama to get to the heart of our tangled foreign policy, but Wells frustrates by broaching the subject that America has brought this action on itself and that sovereign nations have a right to defend themselves regardless of their diplomacy toward this country, only to undercut it by portraying our desire for revenge as not just understandable (which it is) but justified. Bartlet's somber quoting of Dr. King about the vicious cycle of violence does not gel with his routine threats of force throughout the season, and too much of the season's focus on the War on Terror tries to have its cake and eat it too, indulging our anger while arguing at the last second for reason.

The season's greatest weakness, however, simply stems from Sorkin's departure. The dialogue lacks much of his wit; lines are still funny, but the rapid-fire hilarity of yore has given way to sporadic chuckles. Only Bartlet's interactions with Abbey and Charlie retain their amusement, while everyone else sounds as if the characters themselves are trying to sound like they used to. They become synopses of themselves, little more than the sum of past characteristics without development and maturity. This can be seen most nakedly in the season's, if not the show's, nadir: "Access." A C.J.-centric episode structured as a news documentary, "Access" serves as a sort-of "greatest hits" for one of the series' most interesting characters, presenting aspects of her we already knew through the emotionally distancing filter of a narrated documentary. Its plot seems to have been cobbled together in retrospect -- undermining its fleeting sense of immediacy at the end by justifying the impossibility of the cameras capturing secret meetings in a time of crisis by "airing" the doc years later -- but the episode's biggest failure is to condense the weakness of character writing into a dense chunk of regression and stunted emotion.

Still, The West Wing does not become truly bad in its fifth season, merely...average. Take out the setup of Zoey's kidnapping and this could have been the show's first season. It certainly plays like one, more so than the deeper, fleshed-out season that introduced the series and its characters. Most episodes are enjoyable, if forgettable, and a few even rank among the series' better moments ("The Supremes," the two-part episode concerning the shutdown of the federal government over an impasse). But its admirable quest to reach across the aisle fails in the face of Wells' simplification of issues and, frankly, of Republicans, who are still portrayed mostly as self-serving, war-hungry madmen (Walken appeared to be a professional, severe man at the end of the last season, only to be shown to be a goofy hawk who insists on bringing his dog everywhere). Overall, I enjoyed the season, but I felt like I lost whatever shred of political idealism the real world hadn't already purged out of me when Josh Lyman stepped out of a vehicle to scream at the Capitol building.

Apocalypse Now

The real stars of Francis Ford Coppola's troubled epic are not Martin Sheen or Marlon Brando. They're not even Coppola or writer John Milius. No, the real people behind the success of the film are cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and sound editor Walter Murch. Murch's fluid, deeply troubling sounds pervade the film, bleeding into one another seamlessly. Indeed, he grabs you in the first shot, when the sounds of helicopter rotors fade into the dull hum of a spinning fan. For the rest of the film, he skillfully combines Carmine's haunting, ethereal score with diegetic sound, to the point that you can't trust your own ears, much less the hell that unfolds on-screen.

If war is hell, then Apocalypse Now is as much an adaptation of Dante's Inferno as it is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Some may complain about its disjointed nature, particularly in the final chapter in Kurtz's compound, but Coppola isn't out to give us a simple story. He doesn't even want to make a film about the effects of war. No, Apocalypse Now is a film about the deepest, darkest levels of human conditioning, the kind we've spent our thousands of years on this Earth attempting to outgrow.

"Saigon. Shit, I'm still in Saigon," Capt. Willard (Martin Sheen) growls in the first lines of the film. He signed up for a second tour and wants to head back into the jungle, but not for the clichéd gung-ho reasons. He's been back home, but Vietnam so changed him that he could not re-assimilate into society. His restlessness leads him to get high and destroy his hotel room, eventually cutting his hand on glass and smearing himself in the blood. In the very first scene, the notion of the poster boy multiple-enlistee has been viciously perverted, shown to be the victim of war, not the ideal man who stands above it.

He eventually gets a new mission, classified like all his others. A general invites him to lunch and assigns him the task of assassinating decorated colonel Walter E. Kurtz, who disappeared into the jungle after accusations of murder and built his own empire of natives to take the fight to the North Vietnamese without the setback of arbitrary rules of engagement.

Willard heads upriver to Cambodia in a PBR with a motley crew consisting of the surly Chief (Albert Hall), tripped-out surfer Lance Johnson (Sam Bottoms), New Orleans saucier "Chef" (Frederic Forrest) and 17-year-old "Mr. Clean (Laurence Fishburne). Apart from Chief, these sailors are all just kids, all spit and vinegar, ready to take on Charlie anytime, anywhere.

Their picaresque adventures through Vietnam are by turns horrific, absurd, hysterical and deeply, deeply unsettling. The film's centerpiece, an Air Cavalry assault on a NVA-controlled village, is as terrible as it is exhilarating. Led by the certifiably insane Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall, in a show-stealing performance), the sequence, famously set to Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries," must be the largest set piece ever constructed. Now, CGI fills the screen, and entire wars can be waged in a single scene, but the sense of placement, of meticulously construction, camera set-ups, and stunt co-ordinations required for this one 10 minute stretch demonstrate the true craft of filmmaking.

And Kilgore is more interesting than any of it. With a handful of lines, Duvall crafts the craziest SOB you'll ever see. Shells fall all around him and he doesn't flinch, and only when they come within inches does he react, and then only with annoyance. When Willard's boat runs into an operation already in clean-up, the captain can't get the colonel to pay attention long enough to relay orders from COMSAC, but the Kilgore perks up when he learns that Lance, his surfer idol, is among them. With only a small hunk of screen time, Duvall gets two of the three most memorable lines in the film: the hysterical call to arms "Charlie don't surf!" and the insane, poetic rant that starts with, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning." As he commands his soldiers to break out their surfboards to ride waves that are still under fire, as mortar shells burst around him, he says with sadness in his voice, "This war's gonna end someday." We look on bewildered, but Willard knows the truth, that life will never be the same for any of them.

Elsewhere, Willard and Chef take a stroll through the woods looking for mangoes, only to be ambushed by a tiger. In the middle of the river, the USO erects a garish stage to host a couple of Playboy bunnies, and it appears to double as a thriving black market. The bunnies so rile the cheering men that some storm the stage and attempt to possibly rape the women, who run back to their helicopter and depart. In the scene that ensures that no member of the audience can mistake the movie for some fun epic (many point to the Valkyries scene as exciting over horrific), Chief orders a Vietnamese boat stop for boarding, and confusion leads to accidental massacre of all aboard, shattering the young boys and forever turning the Chief against Willard.

Storaro manages to make each segment look entirely different without losing visual flow. The reason so many of us love that Air Cavalry scene is that it's filmed from the POV of the soldiers. One must step outside of the film for a moment to look at it objectively to see how terrible it all really is. That scene with the tiger is funny in retrospect, but Storaro makes the lead-up as frightening as anything in a proper horror film. My personal favorite piece of the film, the Do Lung sequence, strikes me as being shot from the perspective of Lance, who drops acid shortly before the boat pulls up to this nightmare. As a result, light flows in and out, as flares arc over the trees, momentarily blinding before all is plunged back into darkness. Willard searches for the commanding officer, finally asking one of the entrenched soldiers, "Who's in charge here?" to which the manic kid replies, "Ain't you?"

Storaro's cinematography at Kurtz's compound alone earned him his Oscar: Marlon Brando got the job after convincing Coppola that he'd read Heart of Darkness, only to show up having read neither the script nor the book, as well as 40kg overweight. Already guaranteed $1 million even if fired, Brando created a dilemma for the director, which Storaro fixed by covering Kurtz in shadow. The night shots of the compound are bathed with a jaundiced yellow, reflecting the sickness and "slow death" of the camp and its leader. Shadow, in cinema, naturally reflects the moral complexity of a character, but Kurtz and even Willard are so enshrouded in these scenes that they're practically invisible. Willard remarks in his narrations throughout the film that the colonel's methods actually display a brilliance and ingenuity, and he's certainly got a number of deaths on his conscience, and he does not yet know whether he will kill Kurtz or join him.

Brando, difficult as he was, really was perfect for the role. In a mixture of scripted and ad-libbed dialogue, Brando captures the manic insanity of Kurtz. No, not insanity; I read an interview once -- I can't remember who said it, perhaps Grant Morrison -- that discussed the Batman villain the Joker. In it, the interviewee described the Joker as possessing not a madness but a kind of "super-sanity," one that worked on a level that was utterly mad but made sense on a level no normal person could process. Kurtz reached this level after witnessing the VC hack off the arms of every child in a village that his Special Forces team inoculated, simply because they refused that the children receive aid from the enemy. "If I had 10 divisions of such men, then our troubles here would be over very quickly," he intones. Kurtz, a decorated, respected officer who'd seen combat in Korea and in a previous tour of 'Nam, snapped not because of war but because the jungle brought out his primal behavior, the kind that resides in all of us.

There's no truly satisfactory way to end such a film, one that mixes the visceral here-and-now of warfare with metaphysics, but the juxtaposition of two ritual sacrifices, one of tribesmen killing a water buffalo and the other of Willard slaying Kurtz, the bloated, weakened king so that he might die with dignity, is brilliant. Willard emerges to a tribe of warriors already willing to bow to him, but he simply heads back to the boat with Lance and sets off, as Kurtz's immortal "The horror. The horror" plays over a shot of a stone face of the compound. While he's been completely broken by the experience, forever haunted by what he did and what happened to him, he stands as the better man, for he did not lose himself in the jungle.

According to some, Apocalypse Now stands as the last great American film (those who disagree cite Scorsese's Raging Bull). While I would venture to say that 2007's one-two punch of No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood changed that, you could certainly argue that no other films in the interim combined the epic scale of Coppola's final masterpiece with its personal and psychological themes. Coppola began production on the film in 1976, seven years after John Milius completed the first draft of his screenplay. Three years, one heart attack, a hurricane and numerous other production delays later, it finally reached screens.

"What must people have thought then?" I often wonder when seeing a film ahead of its time. I know that Gene Siskel famously gave it a negative review when he first saw it, only to later perform a mea culpa and give it a positive review. Mainstream Vietnam movies had only just started getting releases, and they tended to convey how the war affected its soldiers, who were always brave and cruelly destroyed by a pointless war. Apocalypse Now dared to suggest that this war simply brought out the worst in us, that its soldiers were by and large terrified and looking for any chance to get home, that we were still responsible for our actions even if the government forced thousands to fight.

The film netted Oscars for Murch and Storaro, but it's safe to say that it was robbed in every other category in which it received a nomination, and how Duvall didn't get a nod for Supporting Actor will keep me scratching my head for hours. Apocalypse Now is more than the greatest Vietnam film ever made, more than the best war film period; it is a document of a part of man that no amount of conditioning and evolution will ever fully eradicate, and it's a beast that can emerge with only a strong push.

Wall Street

Who could have guessed that Oliver Stone, a director obsessed with the past, be it the '60s or Ancient Greece, would make a film that would one day seem eerily prescient? Wall Street certainly had its fair share of current events on which to comment when it debuted in late 1987 -- what with Black Monday and the market crash occurring around the same time -- but recent events have cast the film in an entirely new light, one that only makes the excesses of the film's businessmen seem even seedier.

What struck me about the film almost immediately was its attention to detail: Stone brought aboard several business consultants to ensure his film looked just like the real stock floors and boardrooms -- right down to the ratio of women to men in higher positions. The fat cats never rest on their laurels as peons slave away for mediocre wages while they reap all the benefits: they may not be doing "real" work, but executives and brokers move faster than Olympic athletes and wrack their brains over numbers more than engineers. Only the best survive, and they devour the ones who lag behind even for a second. Yet for all its seriousness, to these men it seem little more than a game.

Into this world comes Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen), a stockbroker looking for a big client to deliver a fat paycheck. He sets his sights on one of the biggest players in town, Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), a corporate raider who makes no bones about his willingness to get ahead by any means necessary. Bud tries to win his favor with a box of cigars, but G.G. wants something a bit more substantial. The young broker's father, Carl (Martin Sheen), heads the union of an airline company, and so he begins to feed his potential client information about the company. Over time, Gekko takes the lad under his wing, promising wealth, women and power. He needs to stop worrying about that pesky thing called "legality," is all.

Soon, Bud flies in private jets, buys a swanky home and even scores a hot trophy blonde, the materialistic interior decorator Darien (Daryl Hannah). The sky's the limits. Bud sits in the middle of the rampant, free-market greed of Gekko and the moral compass of his father. Carl just wants his fair share for the union, joking with his son that "money is only something you need if you don't die tomorrow." By contrast, Gekko, in a fiery speech to a company resisting his buyout, coldly admits that "greed, for lack of a better word, is good." Bud only looks on with admiration.

Few directors are better suited to chart the frenetic world of trading like Oliver Stone, who nearly bounces off the wall with energy as he shuffles the corridors with the sharks. He's clearly using the camera to make a point about the pace and casualness of decisions that can put thousands out of work just to bump up profit margins, but Stone never outright condemns the system. No, he's not quite the pinko Commie we make him out to be, and a part of Gekko's infamous "Greed is good" speech isn't all evil: greed really does motivate people to do make some great breakthroughs, and there's nothing wrong with prosperity. Instead, Stone judges those who resort to insider trading and other illegal activities to fuel the unchecked excess of the '80s.

In retrospect, Wall Street reminds me of the worlds Bret Easton Ellis creates: these men aren't really prosperous, they've just buried problems under glitzy illusions. The film never treads in Ellis' dark territory, of course, but you can still practically see the cocaine dust that coats everything. Gekko's mercenary tactics are scarcely removed from the elaborate house of cards that made us all think everything was great until it suddenly collapsed.

The only real weak component of the film is Hannah as Darien: supposedly her ideology conflicted with the shallow nature of the character, but she could have always said no. Nevertheless, she can't bring down such a smartly-written, expertly paced exposé, and Wall Street ranks as one of Stone's finest achievements. Yet I can't help but look at the end, in which Bud rebels against his golden god and must face the SEC, with a certain grain of cynicism: Bud knows he's going to jail for what he's done, but we've all seen businessman after businessman walk away scot free. How strange that I thought his probable incarceration to be almost idealistic.

The West Wing — Season 4

[Warning -- contains spoilers for the last season and possible minor spoilers for this one]

Well, nothing is forever, I suppose. After an ever-so-slightly flawed first season and two of the finest seasons of television I've ever watched, The West Wing finally slipped a bit. Oh, it's still heads-and-shoulders above 98% of any TV that was airing at the time or indeed has ever aired, but Sorkin finally got carried away with himself with one too many flights of fancy. The fourth season of his transcendent show still flirts with the high-water marks of past seasons, it sadly marks a slide into the merely above-average.

The third season ended with the overflow of goings-on that was "Posse Comitatus," in which the possibility of a new beau for C.J. was tragically cut short, Bartlet had a mini-battle of wits with Governor Ritchie, Charlie pushed wacky-but-likable Deborah Fiderer (Lily Tomlin) as Mrs. Landingham's replacement, and the President relucantly decided to assassinate the Qumari ambassador for his involvement in terrorist activities. That's a lot to handle, but unfortunately Sorkin decided to just move on from the death of Simon Donovan without ever really showing C.J. deal with it in order to make room for Qumar and the re-election campaign. I guess the message there is that life goes on.

Nevertheless, the season gets underway in style with the uproarious and insightful two-parter "Bartlet For America," in which Josh, Donna and Toby find themselves trapped in the middle of Podunksville, America after the motorcade leaves without them. It leads to some more flashbacks of characters dwelling on what brought them to Bartlet, and the present-day scenes are filled with some of the shows best gags and one-liners. It's an auspicious start to follow up on a killer season finale.

Then things go awry for a bit. Because Sorkin makes Governor Ritchie out to be a two-dimensional chimp of a man, we know he doesn't stand a ghost of a chance (yes, I know that such a character ran the real world for 8 years, but since the show never brings up mass corruption and cronyism I know Ritchie had no shot). Nevertheless, we have to sit through 7 episodes of "suspense" as somehow Ritchie pulls ahead even in Bartlet's home state, New Hampshire, which is too ridiculous for words. We're really not given any concrete reasons for Ritchie being popular with anyone, much less posing a threat to a wildly popular incumbent, but you have to have some conflict, I guess.

Ritchie of course loses and things start to pick up for the most part. With such a terrible character gone, things can't help but look up. Sadly, the next few episodes fail to capitalize on the momentum of Bartlet's win and the characters even mention how they're just basking in the victory for the moment. That's great guys, but what about the terrorists? Even the Christmas episode doesn't stand up to the previous installments; "Holy Night" introduces Toby's father, who used to be a hitman for the mob, because hey, why not? It also introduces one of the worst characters I've ever seen distract me from an otherwise great show: Zoey Bartlet's new French boyfriend.

Now, I don't remember his name because I simply don't care, but I'm willing to wage money that it's Pierre, Jacques, Jean-Paul, or (if Sorkin just went all out) Jean-Pierre. Hang on, Wikipedia tells me his name is Jean-Paul. Of course it is. Jean-Paul belongs on that list of characters like Jasmine in Angel or Pyz in Veronica Mars, the forced foil to established characters that never quite fits with those characters and instead just wanders around sucking the life-force from the screen. JP fills the role for Charlie, who separated from Zoey for reasons we're never told, as he somehow finds himself in the White House constantly, ostensibly for no other reason than to taunt Charlie because he's tapping that now. Eventually he brings about a terrible event for the Bartlet family, so I can only pray that when I pop in the first disc of Season 5 it shows his body being cremated by Secret Service officials.

Things pick up, funnily enough, with an episode that has almost nothing to do with politics. In "The Long Goodbye," C.J. returns home to see her Alzheimer's-stricken father and must decide how to handle the situation. It's heartbreaking and real, even if the actor playing the father slips in and out of the real symptoms of someone in the advanced stages of the disease (and trust me, I know). From there the show picks up to the same level of quality it enjoyed in past seasons, as the the Bartlet administration must handle a crisis in the fictional Kundu. We also meet Will Bailey, a marvelous character who essentially swaps places with Sam Seaborn when Sam promises Will he'll run for the House in Orange County. Will has a lot on his plate when he arrives at the White House and becomes Toby's direct subordinate on the basis of his skill; in protest of this promotion, the writing staff up and quits, leaving Will in charge of four bubbly look-alike interns, three of whom are all named Lauren.

The finest of these late game pre-finale shows is "Evidence of Things Not Seen," a gripping hour of television where the White House literally comes under fire. The Qumari threat has been bubbling under the surface all season long, but it finally begins to genuinely show itself in the confusion of the small attack. Did the Qumaris fire the shots, or was it just some wannabe anarchist? It all culminates in the usual stellar two-part finale; "Commencement" is one long thriller, unsettling somehow even from the start even though it opens with the President's elation that his daughter is graduating college and that he gets to give the address. Zoey goes to a party afterwards with Jean-Paul, and things go terribly, terribly wrong. An event occurs that is so shocking that Bartlet makes a shattering decision in the follow-up, "Twenty-Five," easily one of the top three episodes of the show so far.

For all my criticisms of this season, even at its weakest moments it contains enough to Sorkin's wit to make it entertaining, even if the plots get just too ridiculous at times. But the sheer two-dimensionality of Ritchie and Jean-Paul grates, and once again Sorkin just flat out declines to explain where peripheral characters go. Near the end of the season Josh and Donna pick a new Associate White House Counsel, who eventually uncovers a scandal. But far more interesting than that was the fact that Josh and Donna mention that the man, a Republican, was the perfect replacement for Ainsley Hayes. I didn't even know Ainsley Hayes had left! I understand that Sorkin wrote every last one of these first 88 episodes, but swallow your pride and hire other people if you can't keep track of things.

Nevertheless, this is a damn good season of TV, and a bit of a watershed moment. After this season, Sorkin and executive producer Thomas Schlamme departed the show citing difficulties with the studio. Without its two dominant runners behind the show, The West Wing fell into the hands of E.R. producer John Wells, a move that I've widely read meant the end of the show's status as a must-watch, but I'll just have to wait and see. But whatever happens after this will hardly dent my love for these first four seasons, even this occasionally tedious one. For my money both "Commencement" and "Twenty-Five" belong on the short list of the show's greatest episodes, and "Evidence of Things Not Seen" and the two-part premiere belong somewhere on that list as well. Now I must brace myself to see what new direction the show will take.

Badlands

"I saw her standin' on her front lawn just twirlin' her baton Me and her went for a ride sir and ten innocent people died"
-Bruce Springsteen, "Nebraska"

Terrence Malick began work on his debut Badlands in his second year at the American Film Institute, crafting not only a script but a sales pitch complete with videos and slides for potential investors. It didn't matter, though; he got his money on the spot and ended up crafting possibly the best "road" movie ever made.

Loosely based on the infamous 1957 murder spree of Carl Starkweather and his girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate, Badlands opens with garbage man Kit (Martin Sheen) walking up to Holly (Sissy Spacek), surely enough, on her front porch twirling a baton. In her voice-over, Holly describes Kit as "the handsomest man I ever saw--he looked just like James Dean." Kit gets fired from his job, and comes to sweep Holly off her feet and take her out of this dead-end town. Soon, Kit leaves bodies wherever they go.

Malick uses the voice-over to create a dialectic between the actual events on-screen and how the character interpreted them. This style would become Malick's trademark, bringing Linda's detached perspective to the love triangle in Days of Heaven and prying into the minds of the soldiers in The Thin Red Line. Holly speaks like the child she is: she views their road trip as the ultimate romantic getaway. Even as Kit blows another hole in some poor sap for no reason, she narrates her journey as if reading out of a teen magazine. Though the real Caril Ann was supposedly just as violent as Starkweather, Malick turns Holly into an innocent child who follows her boyfriend simply because he likes her. "I wasn't popular at school on account of having no personality and not being pretty," and this flattery wins her over as if Kit were Romeo incarnate.

What makes the film so interesting is how little Malick cares about these characters' psyches; Kit never gives a reason for killing, nor does he seem to enjoy it, but he murders anyway. Martin Sheen, in his major debut and possibly his finest performance, plays Kit as a man driven by loneliness and isolation. We don't know--and we never will--why he kills, but we know something went wrong in his life to make him this way. Spacek keeps Holly from being one-dimensional by giving her just enough smarts to figure out that Kit is...a little off. At the end she muses what may have drove him to his ways, but as is often the case with Malick, the point is to ask the questions, not get the answers.

Holly's voice-over and Malick's structuring deliberately rob the film of emotional impact, as he would do with his subsequent films. When Holly starts to spend time with Kit, her father disapproves and, as punishment, shoots her dog. "I was greatly distressed," recalls Holly. Because Kit gets no pleasure from his killings, the murders seem so matter-of-fact that they're emotionally draining. Malick's films would play out like anti-climaxes if they didn't spend the whole time detaching you from the proceedings, and it makes his films so singular in an industry of tropes and cliché.

What brings these two characters together? Kit is 10 years older, and Holly clearly has enough intelligence to see Kit's madness, even if it takes her awhile. What drives them to such acts of horror? The stark feel of the film seems to suggest that they see each other as kindred spirits in alienation; both feel alone even together, and crime seems to be the only thing that adds meaning to their lives. In the final moments, Holly tells us that Kit got the death penalty and she got off with parole and eventually married her lawyer's son, telling us that she's speaking to us from well into the future. It tells us that she's just as empty in the future as she is in the present. Maybe Kit got off lucky.

The West Wing — Season 3

**Warning- may contain spoilers**

After the nonstop excellence of the show's second season, "The West Wing" had a hell of a challenge ahead of it; surely nothing could compare to the bar set. But I learned not to sell Aaron Sorkin short, as he delivers yet another classic season of television.

The last season ended on a cliffhanger of sorts with the President poised to answer whether he would seek a second term. However, like all shows of the 2001-2002 season, "The West Wing" was impacted by the events of September 11th. Postponed a few weeks out of respect, the show returns not with a continuation of the story at hand but a special one-off episode written by Sorkin to address the issues that 9/11 brought up and to raise money for affiliated charities. The special, entitled "Isaac and Ishmael" revolves around a terrorist threat that locks down the White House while a group of specially selected students are touring. To keep them calm, Sam and the other staffers speak to the group about terrorists and what motivates them. As this goes on, Leo and the Secret Service confront a Muslim staffer...just to be safe I guess, because they figure out quickly that he's done nothing wrong.

I know what Sorkin wanted to accomplish with this episode, but it's heavy-handed and comes off like a PSA rather than an episode. Then again, at the time, I can understand why Sorkin was so blunt. I may be young, but I remember the hate, the unabashed open hatred of anyone who even "looked" Arab after 9/11. The message is clear to anyone remotely level-headed (and probably to the entire target audience of the "West Wing"), but Sorkin's insistence on trying to educate everyone makes it stifling.

However, once we really return to the season's canon with the second episode, things get right back on schedule. We learn that Jed Bartlet will indeed seek a second term, and he'll weather whatever Congress throws at him. The last season showed Bartlet and his administration trying to pass their legislature in a Republican-controlled Congress, and this season continues that by having the Republicans come down hard on Jed. My favorite aspect of this is that Sorkin never demonizes them for doing so; indeed, he lets both Jed and Abigail know that what they did was wrong, plain and simple, and they have no right to be outraged or indignant over their treatment.

The MS scandal finally concludes with a run of superb episodes, chief of which is "Bartlet for America," in which Leo testifies how long and how much he knew of the President's illness. I love the flashbacks for this series almost as much as I love the ones of the "Buffyverse;" they always offer such rich insight while remaining immediately entertaining.

In the wake of the huge MS arc, Sorkin needed something big to plug the gap, and he filled it with an explosion of new subplots. Apart from Bartlet gearing up for his re-election campaign, Josh hooks up with a feminist leader and the two constantly debate over legislature important to women, Sam gets duped by the Republican campaign into getting a negative ad on the Bartlet administration played on the news, and, most importantly, the United States must contend with the rising threat of a terrorist attack in the fictional Middle Eastern country of Qumar.

"Isaac and Ishmael" had a good concept but was clearly Sorkin's attempt to appeal to even the lowest common denominator to temper their outrage with contemplation. However, the ending Qumar arc is very much Sorkin working within the actual parameters of the show to deal with the subject of terrorism. A failed attack on the Golden Gate Bridge reveals that Qumar's ambassador to the United States is actually a terrorist organizer, which puts more pressure on President Bartlet than ever before. He and his chiefs of staff debate on how to handle the situation, but eventually only one course of action becomes feasible: they must assassinate the ambassador.

Everything comes to a head in the astounding season finale "Posse Comitatus." As with last season's "Two Cathedrals," it manages to both tie up loose ends and spark a whole new wave of interest. After meeting his Republican opponent, Bartlet vows with increased vigor to win his re-election, while CJ's budding romance with her Secret Service bodyguard is cruelly cut short. The assassination itself sets up a big question for the next season: how will Qumar respond?

When it comes to season finales, I think I'd have to put Sorkin just behind Joss Whedon as the best writer. So far all three season finales have been among the best the show has to offer, and some of the best TV around. Even the first season's big cliffhanger earned its suspense. While I tend to pick the finales out more than anything else, I don't think the actual bulk of the season is weak; on the contrary, it continues the last season's trend of thorough excellence, to the point that picking highlights from the middle is hard. Special mentions would have to go to the aforementioned "Bartlet For America," as well as "The Two Bartlets" and "Hartsfield Landing," in which Jed must come to terms with his abusive childhood, mainly because Toby brings it out of him.

The big weakness this season is the Republican candidate, Florida Governor Robert Ritchie. Clearly a parody of George W. Bush, Ritchie is the anti-intellectual candidate, establishing himself as the opposite of the "elitist" Bartlet. Sorkin fleshed out a number of Republican characters in the course of the show, but Ritchie is so one-note as to be painful. He's just setting this up to be the 2000 election the way Sorkin wanted it to turn out.

Ritchie serves to get in a bunch of jabs at Bush. "Why would they pick him when there are so many qualified Republicans to choose?" ponders Bartlet aloud. Ritchie challenges Bartlet to a clean campaign (even though Bartlet has run all of his campaigns so) only to start throwing out loads of dirty tricks. Look, I don't like Bush either, and I know the "The West Wing" has a liberal bias, but I expect something a bit subtler. Frankly it doesn't even make sense why the Republicans would run Ritchie as the folksy, relatable candidate when Bartlet is so immediately likable. Take the exchange between Charlie and Jed when Jed helps him with his taxes; when Charlie discovers he actually owes money instead of getting a refund, Jed just smiles, holds out his hand, and tells him "you don't even need a stamp. Pay up." He doesn't need to manufacture an image of relatability; he simply is.

Thankfully Ritchie stays in the background - he only appears in one episode- and the focus is more on the staff convincing Bartlet to run as himself and not what he thinks he should be to fight Ritchie. Combined with the rest of the season's predicaments, it makes for another thrill ride of issues and scandal that kept me on the edge of my seat. It's not quite as powerful as the last season, but its still superb.

The West Wing — Season 2

**Warning- may contain spoilers**

I could barely contain my excitement when I opened this box set Christmas morning. I almost wanted to immediately rush into my room, family gathering be damned and plop down to continue watching after the first season so thoroughly enraptured me. Of course I didn't, but the second the family packed it in I put a Do Not Disturb sign on my door and went back to the Capitol. The first season, though flawed in minor spots, set the bar incredibly high, but this season blows it out of the water.

At the end of the last season, President Bartlet and the staffers who surrounded him were fired upon by a group of gunmen. It ended up a bit of a cheap cliffhanger (although it's a hell of an episode), ending before we knew who was shot and why it happened, and forced viewers to wait months to find out. But the two part season premiere, "In the Shadow of Two Gunmen," answers the questions in a way that not only makes the wait worth it but surprises us with a deep insight into what brought the characters to work for Bartlet. As it turns out, White House aide Charlie Young's interracial relationship with the President's daughter Zoey was the basis for the attack; the President wasn't even the target at all. To be honest, I question the intelligence of someone who tried to shoot anyone in the vicinity of the President of the United States, but then one less racist in the world (even a fictional one) is fine by me.

The flashbacks of the episode set up much of the emotional arc of the season. Indeed, even though the Bartlet administration begins to come into its own this season, the real focus is on the characters. The character who gets the most setup here is Josh; wounded severely by the gunmen, Josh spends much of the first part of the season coping with post-traumatic stress disorder. Yet he is never pushed to the sidelines, never dismissed, and never exploited for cheap sympathy.

Ultimately the focus of the second season rests on the Bartlet administration really setting down policies after the first season's excellent "Let Bartlet Be Bartlet" pointed out the administration's wheel-spinning. Jed and his staffers cover a wide range of topics, from a proposed crackdown on racist groups in the wake of the premiere to a nuclear test ban. Then, we learn of the President's MS, which launches a whole new plot concerning if he lied to the public and whether or not he will run for a second term.

This final arc shows just how thought out the season was from the start. In the premiere, we see how the staffers, ideologues all, threw away their careers to work for Josiah simply because they finally found something to believe in. Thus, when Bartlet finally confesses to them his multiple sclerosis, it devastates them. Sorkin knew he was going to tear them down, so he gave us their zenith at the start.

The loss of his staffers' trust, a slew of his biggest political decisions yet, the inevitability that he must tell the people his secret, and the death of a close friend bring Bartlet to the brink in the jaw-dropping season finale "Two Cathedrals," in which the President finally breaks down in private and curses God for his woes. His tirade is made all the more impressive by Thomas Schlamme's impeccable direction, some of the best you'll ever see on a television program. When he stands in front of a press conference and they reporters ask him if he'll run again, Sorkin and Schlamme end the episode thinking they've once again hung us on a cliff. But you can see the answer plainly on Martin Sheen's face. Everything about this episode is perfect.

The best part of this season is its flow; apart from the premiere and finale, it's hard to pick out individual episodes. I mean that in the best possible way. Instead of standout episodes, the whole thing moves along with such narrative force that you'd almost suspect it was some sort of detective program; the notion that it is instead simply a look into political issues is almost baffling.

The only flaw I can find in this season is the occasional disappearance of minor characters. Mandy, the ill-fitting, useless character from the first season, simply vanishes without a trace. I admit I was too happy she was gone to look a gift horse in the mouth, but this issue arose again when White House Counsel Lionel Tribbey up and left to be replaced by Oliver Platt's Oliver Babish. I know it must be hard to keep track of things in this massive ensemble drama, but you can't just switch people for no reason; even tired TV cliché reasons are better than nothing.

Still, that is the only issue in an otherwise perfect season of television. Even though no one character gets more than a moment in the spotlight (how could they with the show's structure?), we get astonishing amounts of insight and personal evolution. From as objective a standpoint as I can judge, "Two Cathedrals" might just be the best hour of TV I've seen. It's not quite my favorite ("Angel's" "Not Fade Away" still reigns triumphant in my heart), but rarely will see a character so thoroughly devastated in the course of 42 minutes. What few flaws existed in the first season have given way to an idealistic yet grounded exercise in narrative of a cinematic scope, one that I can't wait to watch again.

The West Wing Season 1

Why aren’t there more shows about politics? Maybe it’s just because the 2008 election was the first I could vote in that I think politics is fascinating; Barack Obama’s campaign made politics exhilarating, bringing the actual people into the fold more than any of us have ever seen. Politics weaves such a dense web of intrigue, drama, and pitch-black schadenfreude that it’s a gold mine for drama. Or comedy, for that matter. Yet we have only The West Wing, an in-depth, highly acclaimed look into the executive branch that has already been dubbed a classic by fans and critics alike.

Following the inner workings of the executive branch, The West Wing introduces a wide range of characters, all of them driven and optimistic. Staffers write speeches, research events, work on damage control for every political blunder, and spew fast-paced, witty dialogue while moving in a near breakneck pace throughout the White House in a move dubbed “The Walk and Talk.”

All of the major characters are amazing. Communications Director Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff) is a loyal idealist, who stands by his President but is less willing than others to compromise for the sake of politics. Press Secretary C.J. (Allison Janney) trades more witty barbs with White House Correspondents than someone could ever get away with in real life, but it blurs the line between her and the reporters and creates more of a friendly atmosphere. Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe) is the president’s best speechwriter (and the only one Toby considers his “equal”) who cannot seem to hold down a steady relationship to save his life. Charlie Young (Dulé Hill) was created in response to a complaint from the NAACP over the lack of diversity in the show, but he becomes one of the most interesting (and most realistic) characters in the series.

My two favorite staffers are the leaders: Chief of Staff Leo McGarry (John Spencer) and Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford). McGarry, a recovering alcoholic and valium addict, is the glue that holds the executive branch together; he is forceful yet genial and both commands reverence and seems like an ordinary fellow. Lyman, on the other hand, isn’t as charming, at least not to people on the other side of the aisle. He is bold, brash, acerbic, and doesn’t care who he offends. He starts problems from the very start of the series; the first PR nightmare we see in the show stems from Josh’s crass remarks about religion. As the season progresses, we see more and more of Josh’s political cunning and brilliance, and he becomes the most interesting of the staffers.

The West Wing was apparently conceived as a show in which the president made at best cameo appearances. But that all changed when Martin Sheen was cast, and it was the smartest move Sorkin and co. could have possibly made. He establishes his character in his very first scene of the pilot episode: when his aides try to smooth things over with religious leaders after Josh makes a crass joke about God, he confidently strides into the room, not to fanfare, not to applause, hell, not even in a suit. He hobbles in on a cane (he’d been in a bicycle accident shortly before the events of the episode) wearing a track suit, greets the religious leaders warmly, then proceeds to tear them apart with a smile on his face. Up until that point he is a ghost in the background, only referenced to joke about his bike accident, only to sweep in with quiet confidence in a flash. The rest of the episode shows that “The West Wing” could have been a great show had it stuck to its original format, but President Bartlett guarantees its immortality from the get-go.

As is always the case with great entertainment, it’s the little things that make it so memorable. The witty, disarming back and forth between Jed and his naval doctor. Jed accidentally taking both Vicodin AND Percocet for his back pain and ends up jovially fawning over his staff the way a drunk person confesses his deep platonic love for his friends. The basketball game in which Jed brings in an All-American Duke player just to crush Josh and Toby. C.J. lip-synching to “The Jackal.” All of them completely unnecessary, and all of them wonderful.

Even here in its first season, which is clearly finding its footing, there are a numerous moments. “Celestial Navigation” is a fun look at the Bartlet Administration’s PR snafus and features a fantastic performance from guest star Edward James Olmos. “Let Bartlet Be Bartlet” announces a more serious turn for the show, and the finale contains a shocking cliffhager. The best episode is “In Exclesis Deo,” in which Toby arranges a military funeral for a homeless veteran. It is moving and simple and all the more powerful for how little the President appears, which makes it more personal.

Despite the high quality, The West Wing clearly has a few kinks to work out. The relationship between Sam (Rob Lowe) and the call-girl Laurie starts out great, then continues until all humor and depth is stripped of it, particularly when she somehow gets past background checks into the State Dinner (the weakest episode of the season, by the way). Mandy is a pointless, one-note, annoying character who just doesn’t work; happily, Sorkin seems to have figured this out early on and quickly wrote her out of the way. As fascinating as the show is even from the start, the administration doesn’t really do anything, which is finally pointed out by the characters in “Let Bartlet Be Bartlet,” which heralds a new direction for the show.

Still, it’s impossible not to love this show from the start. Bartlet is the perfect president, one with idealistic liberal ideals but with an ability to see the other side’s point of view and an unwillingness to back down. Martin Sheen IS Bartlet and this is the finest work of his career, and he was in Apocalypse Now. The West Wing is certainly a fantasy; everyone is far too optimistic considering the years of political conditioning they have to go through to get to their positions. But it puts political issues into layman’s terms without treating the audience like a moron, and it creates some of the most fascinating characters ever made.