What I've been watching: television

Everyone else seems to be talking about their media-watching habits today, so why not?

My big discovery this summer was Breaking Bad, which I devoured in a massive marathon. I'm now caught up, and while I'm not completely happy with some of the characterization choices in Season 5, there's no question this is a spankingly well-written show. It's brutally dark, funny, suspenseful, and at the same time an intensely moving human drama.

Unlike, say, Mad Men, which I also like, but which is also a show preoccupied with slick surfaces, BB is preoccupied with people's raw interiors. And, like Downton Abbey (*there's* a comparison I bet the showrunners never saw coming,) it's about people who fundamentally like each other. Or, you know, despise each other. Either way, when the chips are down and characters are doing desperate, stupid, awful things to save the people they care about -- as a viewer, I care too.

I said in an earlier post that BB is brimming over with lessons for good writing, and for me this is a useful takeaway. It's not as simple as "writing characters who care" -- Hollywood movies are full of heroes motivated by their relationships. But usually, in such stories, the heroes wear their hearts on their sleeves. It's much more compelling when characters *don't* telegraph how they feel, or aren't themselves aware how much they care about a certain issue, until they are put into a conflict. BB repeatedly *tests*  its characters, and the outcome of those tests isn't predictable. It makes for compelling television.

What else? I'm steaming ahead with Babylon 5 and with the new Dr. Who, which I'm charmed but not compelled by. And Project Runway, where Dmitri is my personal fave, for personality if not design reasons.

What I've been watching: Movies

The Master - aka Paul Thomas Anderson's film about the early days of Scientology, starring Joaquin Phoenix as a crazed veteran-turned cultist -- is pretty much everything you'd expect from the director of Magnolia and There Will Be Blood. In other words, I'm still not sure what I watched. It was good, and Phoenix's performance was amazing. But the pacing of the movie was strange. It didn't hit the narrative beats I was expecting, or make them the focus of the scene when it did. I could talk about what I think the movie was about, but there's no point spoiling it.

I will say that at least one person walked out of the film screaming that it was disgusting, which was strange. This was made stranger by the fact that the "sex" scene that offended her wasn't even a real sex scene, but an odd masturbation scene, and the angry lady had sat through much weirder shit by that point. So this is a film that can really push people's buttons, apparently. Or, bore them to the point they fall asleep (the person in the aisle next to me.) So... yeah.

Cabin in the Woods was all it was rumored to be. I was charmed by it, and by the killer unicorn, and by the Japanese school girls with the happy frog. My only complain is re: the appearance of the Lovecraftian gods. THAT'S NOT WHAT THEY LOOK LIKE. The end.

A Separation -- the Iranian domestic drama that picked up the Oscar last year -- is definitely worth a watch if you like foreign films. It's an interesting slice-of-life in Iran. It's not a happy movie but it's not relentlessly tragic either.

That's it for now.