Mad Men and The Other Women

* an earlier partial version of this article was accidentally published last night. It's complete now.

Have you wondered what happened to our series Mad Men @ The Movies? Well, Matthew Weiner and his team up and ditched the abundant movie references for most of season 5, leaving me to wish that I hadn't required movie references in order to write about the Sterling Draper Cooper Pryce worker-bees each week. Last week's "The Other Woman", a queasy game changing episode is the instant classic Season Five episode but for our purposes The Other Women this season on Mad Men are TV and Music (particularly the Beatles) which have stolen the pop culture referencing thunder from the movies.

Ratings and cinema references may be down (the former an obvious risk when a series disappears for long stretches) but quality, thankfully, isn't.  Not at all. The finale is next week on June 10th, an exhaustive television evening given that True Blood returns and it also happens to be Tony Awards Night and I also have a birthday party to attend... 

The much despised Betty Draper Francis. Still one of the most fascinating characters on television.

Much to look forward to. Much to write about. So herewith brief notes on the last four episodes... 

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How long has it been since you've seen The Matrix?

Last weekend I decided it was time to burn through the DVD queue instead of sitting wordless at my computer. But when I opened the latest rental, The Good Fairy (1935) -- no, I can't remember why I rented it -- the disc was broken. We ended up watching The Matrix (1999) instead because when a black and white Willam Wyler / Preston Sturges comedy starring Margaret Sullavan is denied you, what other movie will do? LOL. 

Warner Bros had sent the BluRay and The Boyfriend remarked that we hadn't seen it since opening night in 1999. It seems like one of those movies we've all seen a million times but in my case that's only because it became such a pop culture staple. Not even its gobsmackingly terrible sequels could shake its grip on the zeitgeist.

The Matrix's modern blend of Alice in Wonderland, gun fetish porn, visual effects bravado, and technophobic dystopia was just what people craved in 1999 when the internet was so obviously and rapidly changing the world. It's tough to even think of a world without the web now but in the early 90s it was still something like a strange and unusual toy... unnerving even if you were hopelessly analog. Watching the movie now in 2012 is kind of a retro shock.

Six observations while watching the movie in 2012...

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Curio: Visions of Prometheus

llustration by PJ McQuade.

Alexa here.

Since the first teasers and trailers for Prometheus arrived I've been firmly in the YES camp.  Take the implications of providing a practically Precambrian timeline for a seemingly familiar alien species, and add all the apocalypticism of a season of Buffy and you are left with me trying to preorder my tickets in March.

Nathaniel has pointed out that Ridley Scott, with his background as an art director, always delivers when it comes to the look of a film, so for a visual fetishist like me even his poor efforts have their appeal (Legend is a Sunday afternoon favorite).

I've been hoping that all the anticipation would galvanize some artists and designers out there, and I haven't been disappointed.  Here are some intriguing creations I've spied in advance of the release.

Illustration by Miguel Delicado.

Click for more posters...

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Take Three: Ida Lupino

Craig (from Dark Eye Socket) here with Take Three. This week actress and director  Ida Lupino

Ida Lupino a "sensation" circa 1941

Take One: The Bigamist (1953)
The Bigamist probes unseemly marital behaviour and stews on moral sorrows. At its centre is Edmond O’Brien toing and froing between two wives. But behind the camera as director, and in a supporting role as O’Brien’s second, San Francisco wife Phyllis Martin, is Ida Lupino. Her unfussy direction creates lean drama and her performance beautifully matches it, with nary an unnecessary furtive glance or superfluous line spoken. She’s a woman bored on a bus tour of Hollywood stars’ homes, chatted up by O’Brien’s depressed bigamist Harry Graham. 

 

Edmond as Harry: Haven’t you any interest in how the other half lives?
Ida as Phyllis: No, not particularly. I’m just crazy about bus rides – gives me a chance to get off my feet.”

Phyllis is smart, practical and wryly humorous. She’s world-weary enough to spot a chancer, but curious enough to give him his chance. Yet, she’s not someone to be taken advantage of. She’s part good-time gal, hired by a failing Chinese restaurant to perk up business that she herself acknowledges she’s failed to do, and part susceptible single girl. It’s clear she wants companionship, so she involves herself unknowingly in an already-married man’s emotions. Lupino deftly conveys just the right levels of guarded vulnerability and earthy pluckiness.

Lupino directed herself twice on screen prior to The Bigamist in Outrage (1950) and Hard, Fast and Beautiful  (1951) – but only in unnamed, uncredited cameos. Here she creates for herself a memorable emotionally driven character which she nails with snap and skill. With the cheeky shrewdness of a Hollywood pro, the perfectly cast Lupino gives herself the film’s best part.  As a director she clearly knows what kind of performance style the part requires; as an actress she fulfils the role with elegant yet slightly spiky precision. 

Two more takes after the jump...

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Learning to Love the Lantern Again

I'm pretty sure I've told y'all at some point or another that Green Lantern was a childhood favorite as superheroes go. I wore a Green Lantern t-shirt proudly. Before the shitty movie was a reality, that is. Recently I've taken to only wearing it on laundry days. My beloved worn shirt mutated into a Tee of Shame.

Last week, wanting something comfortable for a long days travel to Utah, I wore it. As I was walking through the Phoenix airport on layover an adorable little toddler pointed right at me while yanking on his father's pant leg and squealed: 

IT'S GWEEN LANTEUHN!"

I smiled and for the first time in ages didn't think 'Person on Street thinks I have terrible taste in movies!". I suddenly felt warmly toward the power ringed hero again.

I returned from Utah to discover that Green Lantern had come out of the closet (see liplock above). No, not Silver Age brunette Hal Jordan but Golden Age blonde lantern Alan Scott. He wears the ring in "Earth 2" a parallel universe. (For those of you who are unfamiliar with comic books, the ring of power changes owners periodically, and comic books are all fucked up with alternate realities anyways since heroes never age and their histories keep changing).

As much as a gay superhero movie would be a fun novelty, I hope they never make a Green Lantern sequel or reboot. Not that it wouldn't also be fun to see Ryan Reynolds making it with another man, even a ringed projection of another Green Lantern

Sorrry. My mind is its own power ring. It manifests my wishes...but even if Ryan Reynolds were Alan Scott and not Hal Jordan, if he's smart he'll never reprise the role.

On an unrelated but perfectly symmetrical note, please enjoy the awesome comic strip by the talented Anthony Holden which is embedded after the jump. It's a dance party!

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