Paul Levinson's Blog: Levinson at Large, page 180

Mayans, M. C. 1.4: Finger and Face

Mayans M. C. keeps getting better and better, with an altogether excellent episode 1.4 in all sorts of ways.

First, it has my favorite line in the series so far, a line which perfectly typifies the mix of brutality and cool that is the essence of the narrative.  It comes from Angel, who tells E. Z. to cut off a dead guy's finger, so they can have continuing access to his phone.   E.Z. objects with "seriously?" And Angel replies "you're lucky it's a not a new phone, you'd be cutting off his face".  What can I say?  Brutal and ugly, yes, but thoroughly hip to the latest tech.

Meanwhile, the big continuing reveal in the plot is that there is a lot more to Felipe than even was revealed last week, when we saw how handy he was with an old-fashioned gun.   Tonight we learn that Reyes was an identity he assumed in 1985.  So, who was he before?  My guess is some kind of very powerful drug cartel leader, but we'll just have to see.   The Reyes are one complex and compelling family.

Also significant is Coco's sister really being his daughter.   The Reyes may be the most complex, but it's looking like no one in the M. C.  has a straightforward family life.   The advice that Marcus gives E. Z. to be loyal to club above family may make sense, but it will be difficult if not impossible to follow for just about everyone.  Just as it always is.

And last but not least, there's the tunnel that Angel's company literally falls into.  Tunnels are always good conduits of storylines - in reality like El Chapo as well as in fiction - and it will be fun to see what this tunnel brings to the Mayans M. C.

See also: Mayans, M. C. 1.1: Pulling Us In ... Mayans M. C. 1.2: The Plot Thickens ... Mayans M. C. 1.3: Two Presidents

 

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Manifest 1.1: Canterbury Voices

I reviewed the 9 and 1/2 minute sneak peek of Manifest in August, and said it had some outstanding possibilities as a time-travel drama.  I therefore watched the full first-hour debut tonight with great expectation.  And it was good.  But ...

It had very little to do with time travel.  There were some nice time-travel touches, like twins before the airplane which took the passengers five+ years into the future, now separated by those same 5+ years, since one was on the plane and the other on the ground.  Or the almost-fiancee who married someone else, because, well, he thought his girlfriend had died on that plane.

But the real story is that all the people on the plane - captain as well as passengers - hear voices which tell them important things, like the need to free two girls who had been locked in a metal shop.  That was the main story of tonight's episode, which ended with a promise of who knows how many other stories from the other passengers.

So Manifest may well be a Canterbury Tales of time-travel.  Or, this may be a Canterbury Tales of astounding stories in which the vehicle - not of the tales but the people who deliver them - is a plane that skips ahead 5+ years.   This episode also ends with the question of who or what is responsible for this?

Possibilities are people from a future far from ours, aliens, beings from another dimension, the Deity, take your pick.  There's powerful material here - including a boy (one of the twins) who otherwise would have succumbed to leukemia, but now can receive a life-saving treatment not yet available when he boarded the plane in 2013.  So I'll keep watching Manifest, even if, at this point, it may well have little more about time travel.

See also Manifest Sneak Peek 9 and 1/2 Mins:  Could Be Outstanding

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The Deuce 2.3: The Price

I've been saying how glad I am that The Deuce is focusing much more on the porn business this season, and commensurately less on the prostitution and pimp business - what can I say, I'm a media historian - and episode 2.3 seemed to be doing the same tonight, until it turned it all around.

Lori and Harvey won awards in California - I cheered - and Candy gets an appointment with a money-man who can finance her "Little Red Riding Hood" movies - actually, two movies, one X-rated, one not, to maximize its appeal.  And the guy seems interested.  He offers to write a $10, 000 check.  Good news!  But ... only if she performs fellatio on him, as he's writing the check, to use the courteous term for that.  Candy considers, and agrees.  We can see that she's disgusted.  The price she has to pay for leaving her life of prostitution in the past is to be a prostitute, albeit briefly, again.  In her final scene of the evening, we see her thinking, unhappily, about what she had to do.  But she takes out the check and props it up on her table.  She's determined to make it as a director, whatever it takes.  She thinks, ultimately, that she made the right decision.

Lori has a different crash with reality.  She comes home to New York, elated about her win, and tells CC that she's finished "tricking".  He throws her trophy against the wall, and partially breaks it.   CC has no intention of letting her go.  Lori is not likely to put up with that, in the long run.  But, for now, her award has no impact on her status as prostitute.

So the story of the emergence of the porn profession from the prostitute profession, at this point in The Deuce, is that the emergence is no easy path.   The advance from prostitute to porn director or star either requires more prostitution, or can be blocked by the prostitute's pimp.

I'll see you back here next week with another report on how this story progresses.

See also The Deuce Is Back - Still Without Cellphones, and that's a Good Thing ... The Deuce 2.2: Fairytales Can Come True

And see also The Deuce: NYC 1971 By Way of The Wire and "Working with Marshall McLuhan" ... Marilyn Monroe on the Deuce 1.7 ... The Deuce Season 1 Finale: Hitchcock and Truffaut 

  
It all starts in the hot summer of 1960, when Marilyn walks off the set
of The Misfits and begins to hear a haunting song in her head,
"Goodbye Norma Jean" .. Paul Levinson's books ... Paul Levinson's music

Joan Baez at the Beacon Theater

There are so many ways I could begin my review of Joan Baez's superb concert at the Beacon Theater tonight -
This is the second time in less than a week that Tina and I attended a farewell concert - Paul Simon's at the Prudential Center in Newark last week and Joan Baez's tonight.  In both cases, the concerts were so good that it's hard to believe these masters of music, voice, and lyrics are retiring from touring.  Joan Baez, always current and trenchant, sang a powerful song about immigrants.   We couldn't help thinking about Joy Reed's interview of Jose Antonio Vargas as the Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn Wednesday night.One of Joan's last songs was Paul Simon's "The Boxer" - also one the last encores that Paul Simon sang last week.  "I am leaving but the fighter still remains" was never more apt.And all of those openers are valid.   And there is much more to be said about Joan Baez's concert tonight.  She said, after one song - a song her sister Mimi sang all the time - that it's hard to sing and cry at the same time.  At several times in the concert, I felt the same way about applauding and crying.  Especially after she sang Zoe Mulford's "The President Sang Amazing Grace".  (Yes, that's exactly what the song's about.)

Baez sang one of her masterpieces early on - "Diamonds and Rust," her parting reflection about Bob Dylan.  This was after opening the concert with a Dylan song.  She followed with a wonderful rendition of Phil Och's "There But For Fortune" - a lyricist who never received the recognition he deserved as someone right up there with Dylan.  And she sang several more Dylan songs, including the incomparable "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," which Baez linked to the state of the nation and world today.   After all these years, Joan Baez remains the best voice Dylan ever had.
And we do live in a world "where souls are forgotten," certainly by the White House and its minions.  Which means we need Joan Baez's voice more than ever.  I remain ever hopeful we can hear it again.
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Mayans M. C. 1.3: Two Presidents

An excellent Mayans M. C. 1.3 this week, in which what struck me as the most potentially provocative thing in this explosively provocative series was the two Presidents of the two Mayan motor clubs.

One is Bishop, well played by Michael Irby, and head of the Mayans club in far-southern California.  The other is Marcus, well played by Emilio Rivera, head of the club more up north, and someone we saw in Sons of Anarchy.  The focus in Mayans M. C. is on Bishop's club, but Marcus's presence is not insignificant.

And this week we saw an important exchange between them.  After Bishop shoots and kills Jimmy - the surprise killing in this week's episode (almost every week has one) - he asks Marcus why Marcus did not want Bishop to tell his club about the planned killing beforehand.   Marcus's response indicates he doesn't trust Bishop's crew - Marcus suspects that someone in the southern chapter may be a rat.

This conversation between the Presidents demonstrates an important facet in Mayans, M. C. - there's not just one, but two, Mayans M. C, in this story, and I'd guess that sooner or later that number will be crucial.

Meanwhile, we also get a great scene from Felipe, when he takes a classic-looking gun and points it a detective keeping track of him and E. Z.   There's more to Felipe than meets the eye.  He's not only fiercely protective of his two sons.  He knows how to deal with pesky police.

Looking forward to more of this series.

See also: Mayans, M. C. 1.1: Pulling Us In ... Mayans M. C. 1.2: The Plot Thickens

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The Sinner Season 2 Finale: The Ambiguity of Harry

A good twist in the season 2 finale of The Sinner this week.  Turns out Marin's killer wasn't a killer - her shooting was an accident in a scuffle - and it wasn't the Beacon who was part of this.  He's apparently long dead after all.

Jack Novak was a pretty good surprise - the kind that is instantly believable after coming out of the blue.   And his connection to Marin certainly is plausible.  He raped Marin, after she and Heather came back to his/Heather's house, as teenagers, with Heather blind drunk and Marin not in any shape to go home.  And at that point, the rest was predictable:  Jack is Julian's father, and he'd been sending money to Vera for Julian (maybe Vera was blackmailing Jack).

The Vera and Julian escape thread was also handled well.  Vera wants to take Julian to Washington state, where'd he'd be free and safe.  But Julian doesn't want to run the rest of his life.  And Harry is able to convince Vera on the phone that her best course of action is to bring Julian back to upstate New York.

The one unsatisfying part of this finale is, unsurprisingly, Harry's story.  We still don't know exactly what happened between him and his mother, and still don't not know exactly why he wants oblivion, even after he and we finally here the recording of what he said to Vera when he was under the influence of that mind-altering drug.   I guess this means that, if The Sinner continues - which I hope it does - we'll have as a more-or-less constant the ambiguity of Harry, and still not knowing what made him what he is today.

But that still amounts to a highly original, compelling character, and I'm definitely game for a third season.

See also The Sinner 2.1: The Boy ... The Sinner 2.2:  Heather's Story ... The Sinner 2.3: Julian's Mother ... The Sinner 2.5: The Scapegoat ... The Simmer 2.7: Occluded Past Unwound - Mostly

And see also: The Sinner season one: Wild, Unconventional, Irresistible Mystery

 
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Jose Antonio Vargas and Joy Reid at Powerhouse Arena

 I first heard about Jose Antonio Vargas in 2007 from my wife Tina.  She was editing Barack Obama's and Hillary Clinton's Wikipedia pages, and Jose had called her for an interview in a article he was writing for The Washington Post about the impact of Wikipedia on that Presidential election.  Those were early days in the advent of social media - or what I call New New Media (buying a book online is new media, creating a book online is new new media, or consumers becoming producers).  Twitter and YouTube were just a year old, and Wikipedia, though a little older, was not allowed as a reference in student papers in probably every class except mine at Fordham University.   But it was a new new medium par excellence - anyone who could read an article on Wikipedia could edit it - and Tina and Jose recognized its importance.

Tina and Jose kept in touch after that article was published in 2007.  We were delighted when Jose's team at The Washington Post won a Pulitzer Prize the following year for their reporting of the Virginia Tech massacre, and applauded his incredible bravery when, in 2011, he announced that he had been living here in the United States since age 12 as an undocumented immigrant.  Jose and I had met for the first time, a month earlier, in May 2011, when we both were guests on The Dylan Ratigan Show on MSNBC, talking about social media and politics.   Tina and I greeted him at a screening of his autobiographical documentary Documented at the Village East Cinema in Manhattan in 2014 and saw it again on CNN.  (Jose had asked Tina to look at part of it before the film was completed.)

We of course were in the front row last night when Jose was interviewed by Joy Reid at the Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn about his new book, Dear America.  First, the venue, with a Manhattan Bridge archway out the window as backdrop for the speakers, was perfect.  And Joy conducted a savvy and empathetic interview, not easy when you're better known than the subject of interview.  Jose told the story of his difficult and dangerous life, which is the story of his book, which I'll review here in the next few weeks, after I've read it.  It's the story of someone not only unwilling to accept the hand our idiotic and arbitrary immigration laws has dealt him, but unwilling to accept this everyone else in the same or similar boat as he.   Not only does Jose refuse to live off the radar, he and his group Define American, actively campaign in every way they can to take this discriminatory radar, inconsistent with the true spirit of America, totally offline.

From such an all-out warrior, we shouldn't be surprised to find unusual opinions.  Jose of course sees Trump as a threat to what is good in America, but musing about Presidents and their impact on immigrants, he cited George W. Bush as the President who was most congenial to immigrants, meaning that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama not as much.  In other words, Democrats and Republicans have been more equal opportunity abusers of this crucial aspect of the American dream than we may have supposed.

Go see Jose talk wherever you can.  And get his book.  And look here soon for my review.


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The First: The Best

Tina and I binged The First on Hulu the last couple of nights - the first being the first mission with people onboard to Mars.   We enjoyed it immensely.  I'd say it's the best of any-mission-to-anyplace-in-space narrative on screen, and that includes some masterful motion pictures like Apollo 13 and The Right Stuff.

The First begins with a shocker which I won't reveal, and then focuses on a mission to Mars in the 2030s.   The future depictions on Earth are just right - causal voice commands to turn lights and phones off, given by characters for whom these ways of doing things have become a comfortable way of life.  But that's about the only thing that's not teeming with tension and anxiety, as five humans plan to risk their lives, in a joint private company/NASA mission which the U. S. President is by no means 100% in favor of.

But the real emotional pay dirt in The First is not political or scientific - and there's plenty of excellent science in the story - but in the impact of this mission on the families of the astronauts. This has been a complex dimension well explored in earlier missions-to-space movies, but not as effectively as in The First, in which each one of the astronauts has to negotiate a powerful nexus of family reservations, to say the least, about their loved ones going on a life-risking voyage.

The story is buoyed by two off-the-chart performances.  Sean Penn has been an Al Pacino/Robert De Niro-level actor for decades, but he's been infrequently seen on screen in recent years.   His Tom Hagerty in The First, the astronaut leading the mission, more than makes up for lost time.   I've previously seen Natascha McElhone, who plays an Elon Musk or Richard Branson kind of outer space CEO in The First, in Californication and Designated Survivor.  Her Laz Ingram in The First is so much better - a tour-de-force combination of powerful, single-minded, and empathetic - that I could almost believe I was seeing a different actress.   Penn and McElhone, and indeed The First as a whole, are eminently Emmy-worthy.

I was on a plenary panel about Religion on Mars at The Mars Society Conference in Pasadena this past August 24.  I had to leave before Beau Willimon's panel on The First on August 26.  Willimon was the brains behind House of Cards and now The First.   If I could flag down a time machine, I'd travel back there and tell Willimon what an outstanding job he did on The First.   Like all great popular culture, this series will play a role in getting a real mission to Mars with humans aloft in what I hope will be sooner rather than later.  In the meantime, I look forward to the next season.



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The Deuce 2.2: Fairytales Can Come True

The evolution of porn continues to take center stage in The Deuce 2.2, with Candy realizing that a good way to go forward, get more sophisticated, in her movies is to base at least one on a fairytale - or maybe it's a nursery rhyme - Little Red Riding Hood.   Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs' "Little Red Riding Hood" plays in the background - also a raunchy version of that nursery rhyme and always good to hear.

In other movie-related developments on The Deuce, Larry Brown - played by Gbenga Akinnagbe from The Wire and lots of other memorable performances - asks Candy why there are not any "brothers" in her movies.  He aptly points out that acting is the essence of being a pimp, and he would be up to cast in her movies, and you can see the wheels in her head beginning to turn.

And ... at very least, Lori will be heading out to Hollywood, because you can't have a story about the movie business without some significant kind of Hollywood involvement.  What these movies are of course doing is lifting our characters way beyond New York to the world at large.

Indeed, the local non-movie threads in this episode are just two brief scenes.   One concerns the windowless peepholes and their complications.  The other concerns an alternate mob move on Vincent's bar, and will likely lead to some sort of bloodshed before the season is over.

As a media theorist, I'm enjoying the emphasis on porn over in-person pimping and prostitution, meaning, so far, I'm liking this season more than season 1.

See also The Deuce Is Back - Still Without Cellphones, and that's a Good Thing 

And see also The Deuce: NYC 1971 By Way of The Wire and "Working with Marshall McLuhan" ... Marilyn Monroe on the Deuce 1.7 ... The Deuce Season 1 Finale: Hitchcock and Truffaut 

  
It all starts in the hot summer of 1960, when Marilyn walks off the set
of The Misfits and begins to hear a haunting song in her head,
"Goodbye Norma Jean" ..

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Paul Simon Farewell Concert at Prudential Center: "Don't Give Up"

Tina and I just got back from Paul Simon's Farewell Concert at the Prudential Center.  We both thought it was one of the very best concerts we've ever attended - and that includes at least two concerts with Simon and Garfunkel decades ago.

Paul Simon was always as much a poet as a lyricist and songwriter, which is not something you can say about even the greatest lyricists, like Lennon and McCartney, whose words only occasionally reached the realm of sheer poetry.  Simon does that almost every time, in every song.   I knew that before tonight, but his words leaped even more out at me than I recall in the past.   He has a nonchalant profundity almost rolling off his tongue, from "Call Me Al" and "Late in the Evening" to "Crazy After All These Years" (his line "I fear I may do some damage one fine day" has always been one of my all-time favorites).

And his new songs have it too.   The fun and sass of "Rewrite" is as good as "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,"  the haunting beauty of "Questions for the Angels" as memorable as "For Emily," and the keen watercolor imagery of "Rene and Georgette Magritte with their Dog After the War" is right up there with the brush strokes of "Hazy Shade of Winter".

And if the music and singing and band weren't enough, Simon's repartee between songs was worth the price of admission.  He talked about a song he gave to someone else, and he now wanted to reclaim as his own. I thought he was perhaps talking about "Red Rubber Ball," which he wrote and was a big hit for The Cyrkle.  He wasn't.  He was talking about "Bridge Over Troubled Water," the big Simon and Garfunkel hit, mostly sung by just Garfunkel.   Talk about a dis - I don't why Simon harbors such anger for his former partner, but this was a rapier thrust all the way back to 1970.

But in many ways the best line was what Simon had to say about these Trumpian times we live in, without mentioning his name.  "Don't give up," he said quietly to a cheering audience.

You know what - I don't think this and his next few, concluding performances on his farewell tour will be his last.  The audience tonight had too much groove, and Simon far too much joy and commitment to his performance, for that to be true.

Look for my review here whenever he does his next series of concerts.




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