The Wire: HBO’s Best & Most Important Series; Why the Press Doesn’t Know it Exists

With The Sopranos 1999 opening season, a television renaissance spawned – most exclusively on HBO. HBO led the way then and continues to push the creative envelop now, redefining not only the standards of television programming, but enlivening traditional genre content with its original programming. Most notably, in urban comedy (Sex and the City), organized crime (The Sopranos), historical drama (Deadwood, Rome), domestic drama (Six Feet Under), the 30-minute sitcom (Entourage), off-the-cuff comedy (Curb Your Enthusiasm) and the crime drama (The Wire).

The Wire now enters its fourth season, thriving in a low-key profile mirroring that of its beautifully constructed inner-city drug dealing characters. However, unlike the clandestine nature its characters strive to maintain as means of survival, the show itself is struggling to shed sunlight on its very existence. It’s amazing that a program that has achieved such cinematic excellence as The Wire has remained as obscure to the television viewership. It seems that gritty, raw, complex characters that challenge the stereotypes associated to each role have a hard time making their way into mainstream consciousness, especially in the crime genre.

The sad truth is it’s not only the audience that has missed out on the show (I didn’t watch it until this summer on On Demand), but the critics have neglected it as well. Maybe there’s something about the images The Wire gives us; littered urban streets, boarded windows, fluorescent lit police stations, that sub-consciously blocks our attention. If we’ll venture outside our known experience, we’re more inclined to venture into one of more rewarding fantasy, like Sex and the City – where people are beautiful and have cozy lives. The ghetto? Tough sell. The Times ran a story a few weeks ago about the finale of the hit series, Entourage. In the article the writer, Bill Carter, runs a list of HBO’s up-coming schedule and gives a general overview of the network’s health. (View article here: subscription needed) The Wire was not even mentioned. This is a show now in its fourth season and people who have actually seen it all agree it’s the best show ever to touch television. How can a source of The Times importance miss this? It’s mind-boggling to people who have actually seen the show. David Simon, the show’s creator has attributed this to several issues, one being that it’s too complex to follow for people who don’t keep up with it. This corroborates with people whom I’ve tried to evangelize. I always get the same response, “I’ve heard great things about it, but its already the fourth season.”

Today, The Times, tried to correct their previous failure to publicize the show with a medium-sized piece talking about the fourth season’s in-depth look at the education system of inner city Baltimore. (Read here: subscription needed) Writer, Virginia Heffernan, commences with the declaration: “This season of ‘The Wire’ will knock the breath out of you.” From there we’re given an overview of the season’s new characters, all middle-school juveniles struggling not to slip into the cracks of their environment’s realities. The education system is the new institution The Wire faces off with, continuing its thread of dissecting the realities of class and power in “the game.” Each character the show has written in the three previous seasons has been a multi-sided human being. In the network’s documentary about the new season, they compare it to a Greek tragedy, where some characters are destined to live out their path, never with a chance to make it out while living in a life dynamic of obscure higher powers and shadowy social class divisions.

The Times article is titled, “Higher Learning in the Drug Trade for Four Baltimore Students,” and beyond the first sentence’s declaration of brilliance, nothing much follows to illustrate a fluid closeness with the series at large. It comes across that Heffernan was given a writing assignment (most probably a token of HBO’s internal marketing team’s push for the new season’s premiere tomorrow night at 10pm EST), along with a tape of the season and some background information and clips on the previous seasons and evolving storylines. It’s great that the show is getting some press but no major newspaper or mainstream periodical has given the show the same juice as many of the networks previous and continuing shows. This is sad because a great majority of the people who get turned on to the show now have lost three seasons of impeccable acting, writing and cinema in part because of the negligence in publicity. The critics at places like The Times need to take a serious look at the entire series and start writing winning and thorough reviews of this gem in order to sway the types of viewers who need a paid invitation in order to attend an event. Unfortunately, this is the majority.

The Wire is the best show on television and you’d do yourself a great favor to rent the first season and then catch the rest on On Demand. Season two is perhaps my favorite thus far, with no feelings but excitement and fascination for the others. Most innovations are initially met with resistance. The Wire is certainly an innovation in network story telling. With time, some of the worthiest innovations make it inside the public domain of knowledge. A television program relies on this for success. Let’s see if The Wire can do what its predecessors have already accomplished, but this time the critics need to help.

The Illusionist; An Intriguing Character Trapped In Foolish Formula

Writer/Director Neil Burger creates a party mix of mostly poorly flavored plot amidst a potentially intriguing character study in “The Illusionist“. The former of which seems to be another consequence of the Hollywood culling machine.

Edward Norton, who again provides some moments of brilliance, plays, Eisenheim The Illusionist, a magician performing in Vienna during the Hapsburg Empire. His template nemesis is Crown Prince Leopold, played with some conviction by Rufus Sewell. Paul Giamanti has certifiably entered the pantheon of Hollywoods best and most consistent actors, and here, as Chief Inspector Uhl, he creates another character we’re empathetically connected to. The last of the main characters is Jessica Biel, as Norton’s soul mate, Sophie. I must confess I was not impressed with Biel’s performance, however, I don’t pin the fault on her alone.

So, we have an artist/genius in love with the woman engaged to a diabolical monarch. Brokering the relationship between these two men is a police inspector from the same class as the artist, but employed by the upper class, who promises new status if he acquiesces to the personal desires of the Monarch, despite the law.

The love story between the artist and his lover is typical and like the ENTIRE love story in this film, cliche`. There used to be a literary law that true love can only be tragic, Hollywood has killed that long ago. Here we have poor boy and rich girl in love as children, seperated by the troughs of social class, seperated for nearly two decades, reunited, small talk, love making, their past misfortunes reversed and vala!, they live happily ever after. And no, this is not an oversimplification, it really did feel and play out this way. It killed the film and devoured the plot.

So often it felt like Norton was playing two characters. There was one, the intrigueing artist, and the other, the man in love. Norton seemed none too comfortable with the latter and right at home with the former. He gravitates to the intellectually challenged man, whose only true nemisis’ in life are the ideas he must conquer or the ghosts invisible within. But as a lover, he fell flat on his face. It’s hard to understand exactly why, but I see an actor of Norton’s sensibility uninspired to sell himself these oversimplified and underdeveloped feelings. And the same goes for Biel, who did show more facial pangs of love than Norton, but still could not sell this “soulmate-rescue-me” script.

*Note: if one wants to view a great tragic love re-united story and unsurpassed acting, see The Count of Monte Cristo with Gérard Depardieu and Ornella Muti as Mercedes.

Ultimately the film’s thematic clash was the spiritual democracy vs. the autocratic monarch, played out in several tangents, manifested by which man would have Sophie (wisdom) in the end. And unfortunately, only a moral lesson is at play, rather than a beneficial harmony of reality and art. These doses of reality would have served this tensionless story well: Giamanti’s character was attempted to be rounded by consistently following out the Crown Prince’s orders, but we knew all along that his heart belonged to Eisenheim (Inspector Uhl is conveniently an amateur magician who seems to not possess the envy a man should in his shoes – a lower class butcher’s son under the thumb of the Monarch.) One is reminded of Mozart’s counterpart Salieri in Amadeus and how brilliantly this human envy was portrayed by F. Murray Abraham. Secondly, where was the soulful corruption that would have manifested by this point in Uhl’s career? He seemed to still possess the purity of the butcher’s son, yet he presumably had been working under a corrupt autocrat for years. If he was a man and not a saint, surely, there would have been some manifestation. If you swim in the ocean long enough you become a fish. It’s not Giamanti’s fault, the script just didn’t have it.

The script seems to be the culprit for the film’s crashing nothingness. It gives us a brilliant character in Norton who gives us three speeches that suggest the depth behind his genius: first on Time, second on the Soul, and lastly, on Power. All three of these themes play out before us; the timelessness of true love, the immortality of the soul as the lovers fake their death – feigning Romeo and Juliet, and how the true seat of Power is in the mind of a man, not his fist, as the artist, Eisenheim, outwits the brawn of autocrats and lawmakers. The spiritual democracy wins.

Coming away, I am unsatisfied with a film that offered so much, yet provided so little. I’ve raised my expectations on film: I want to be enlightened or taken back down to reality, and everything else – everytime I know exactly what a character will say or do – I just cannot help but see it as a greater reflection of the state of American art: product trumps the artist. I am dismayed that I feel this way given the respect I have for the artists involved in the film. They’ve all made it this far and I give them all the respect in the world for it, but where is the fearlessness? Why are there so few ground-breaking films when they seemingly know what it takes to break new ground? In this film, it’s all there, all the elements of a potentially great film, yet at every crossroad they walk on the path MOST taken, not the path of originality.

The film itself supports a spiritual democracy over an autocratic monarch, but seeing how the film time and again sold its substance to the dogma of cliché storytelling, I wonder the extent to which the creators truly understand what they are saying. Or if they do understand, but are just creatively dismantled by the financial powers that be, what does this say? It’s a dismal reality when art is not allowed to speak for itself, but rather speaks through the voicebox of financial gain. Who will ever know how much is lost, from the moments the writer compromises a line of dialogue to the moment a studio markets the tagline. We will never know how much is lost until we ourselves can look in the mirror and see what we have given up over a lifetime living under autocratic belief systems covered with sugary terms like democracy and freedom. Perhaps then we get the message of the movie, and then perhaps we may say, “fuck, they missed the point!” Make an audience member cry over seeing his dreams shattered on screen and maybe make him rethink things, but show him his greatest dreams realized on screen and you get a lazy, mindless consumer; the unbeknownst to himself benefactor of his own delusion. The Illusionist.

The Common Act to Judge What One Does Not Know; or, Why I Have Not Seen Snakes On a Plane

Maybe it was the title, but no, that falls short of the entire truth. It’s what the title is symptom of: the marketing machine selling beef jerky as filet mignon. There’s already buzz that this film is a cult-classic. The only thing cult I can see is the cult of personality. A cult classic cannot be a self-conscious attempt at being such, it’s a bizarre creation, an original creation – it’s not a template; Eraserhead, Rocky Horror Picture Show, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Jodorowsky’s “El Topo” – to name a few.

Snakes On a Plane? Come on now… I can see the nearest hipster run into the “café” and intellectualize the phenomena of what is now known as Snakes On a Plane. I just want to repeat the title as many times as I can, because, there is genius to it… it’s something you love to pronounce and even enjoy hearing about as much as Samuel L Jackson’s scream. I mean, does Hollywood have any shame? Mr. Jackson’s career mirrors this film’s tragic flaw – you know what will happen before you see it.

The world came to love and admire Samuel L. Jackson’s authoritative persona after his Pulp Fiction performance, but all Hollywood seems to want from him is to relive the intensity of his famous Ezekiel 25:17 speech, “…the path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of …“ I bet many of you can fill in the blanks… music to any admirer’s ears. Hollywood loves to find a moment that hits the jackpot and then squeeze it over and over again until it has as much juice as fire wood.

Snakes On a Plane? Name it “Marry Lou Died on a Plane” and let the zaniness of giant snakes surprise and bewilder our rationale that people get paid millions to think of this shit. But please do not bring on the marketing squad to mind-fuck us into believing something is a cult classic that has been out for 1 week. You find cult classics on the video shelf of the strange kid in high school who often obsessed himself in Goth literature or in the prized collection of a film buff, but never in the possession of the mass market. So…I’m sorry to be so cynical, but let us decide what is cult, please don’t step on that authenticity in the same breadth that Samuel’s has: turning original art into a parody of itself. I’ll give Mr. Jackson the benefit of the doubt, because I still remember him robbing McDowell’s in Coming to America – I know he worked his ass off before he made that speech for Quentin Tarantino. I also know Hollywood has also worked its ass-off to get the cinematic dominance it now enjoys, but the world is bursting for something new from film and right now, there isn’t a CGI snake in sight who can recite Ezekiel 25:17 the way Samual Jackson could pre-stardom.

Film Cousin Blog Introduction

Film Cousin is a blog dedicated to serious and thoughtful criticism of film, both classic and comtemporary. Here we’ll review what’s playing in the cinema to the timeless classics, and anything in between we feel is worth writing about.

Who Are We? The blog was started by after finding some inspiration while exchanging emails with my cousin in France. He provided some ass-ripping criticism of the short film I was writing and the ensuing dialogue that followed is what got me here.

So what now…

…we encourage enthusiastic and intelligent posts aimed at extracting the artistic and/or cultural essense of the films we choose to review. Or, inversely, we encourage a ravenous deconstruction of a film whose attempt at art falls no further than posturing. And, of course, I’ll repeat the motto of the great story teacher, Robert McKee, “write the truth.”

If you want to start posting reviews we encourage you to email us…we’d be happy to add you as a member.

Have fun…