Mad Men: Season Two Review

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(More customer reviews)Sopranos' writer, Matthew Weiner's Mad Men series is arguably the best reason to own a television these days. Set in 1960s New York City, the show involves a group of Madison Avenue ad executives and their secretaries working, smoking, drinking, and socializing together at the Sterling Cooper advertising agency. In the show's first season, Mad Men provided viewers with a window into an American culture of Nixon-era social taboo-isms: alcoholism, sexism, racism, and consumerism, which is mainly what made Mad Men so fascinating. It's easy to see why the show won two Golden Globe awards in 2007 for Best Television Series - Drama, and Best Actor in a Television Series - Drama and the Emmy Award for Best Outstanding Drama Series. Imagine the "Mad-ness" of a bunch of complicated, alcoholic, Nixon-era, GQ ad men in starched white shirts, spending their workdays in a fog of cigarette smoke, and you'll have the basic premise of this highly-acclaimed, must-see show.
Mad Men's characters are a truly well-drawn bunch. For instance, the protagonist, Don Draper (Jon Hamm), is not only the creative director and junior partner of Sterling Cooper, he is also the illegitimate son of a prostitute, now living an assumed identity to hide his inner "whore child" from his wife and competitive Madison Avenue colleagues. Don is unhappy with his life. He drinks Jack Daniels, chain smokes Lucky Strikes, cheats on his trophy wife Betty (January Jones), and constantly dreams of escaping his life. He is known to sneak away from work to see afternoon foreign movie matinees. Betty, a former model, represents the classic '50s homemaker, but suffers from profound loneliness, sexual frustration, and dissatisfaction with her "perfect" life. (In Season One, we learned that household appliances literally give her orgasms.) With aspirations of becoming the agency's first woman copywriter, Peggy Olsen (Elisabeth Moss) was a new secretary at Sterling Cooper, who was unexpectedly confronted with an unwanted pregnancy. Italian bachelor, Salvatore Romano (Bryan Batt), is Sterling Cooper's macho art director, a homosexual afraid to come out of the closet, and equally afraid to act on his sexual impulses.
Season Two premiered on July 27, 2008 and picks up on Valentine's Day, 1962, two years after the first season during the Kennedy administration, an era marked by the growing civil rights movement, Bob Dylan, free love, increasing feminine discontent, crumbling marriages, the threat of nuclear annihilation, Leave It to Beaver, and New York poet Frank O'Hara's ever-ominous 1957 message of mortality: Meditations in an Emergency. Much of Season One's comic edge is now gone, and the tone of the show is more melancholic. While Don and Betty Draper experience marital problems, enigmatic Don experiences a full-blown existential crises while away on a business trip to sunny Los Angeles. Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) becomes disillusioned with his own "perfect" marriage and realizes he is in love with Peggy (Moss). The series ends under the cloud of the looming Cuban Missile Crisis. Mad Men remains television at its best.
12/12/08 Update: Mad Men and Jon Hamm received Golden Globe nominations this week for Season Two of Mad Men.G. Merritt

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Set in 1960s New York City, Mad Men explores the glamorous and ego-driven “Golden Age" of advertising, where everyone is selling something and nothing is ever what it seems. And no one plays the game better than Don Draper (Golden Globe(r) - winner Jon Hamm), Madison Avenue’s biggest ad man – and ladies' man – in the business. Returning for its second season, the Golden Globe®-winning series for Best TV Drama and Actor continues to blur the lines between truth and lies, perception and reality. The world of Mad Men is moving in a new direction -- can Sterling Cooper keep up? Meanwhile, the private life of Don Draper becomes complicated in a new way. What is the cost of his secret identity?

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When You're Strange: A Film About The Doors (2010) Review

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(More customer reviews)In the short 4 ½ years that keyboardist Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robbie Krieger, drummer John Densmore and lead vocalist Jim Morrison enjoyed an artistic collaboration, they produced six timelessly resonant studio albums and the classic Absolutely Live (which still holds up as one of the best live albums ever by a rock band). The Doors were also one of the first rock bands to successfully bridge deeply avant-garde sensibilities with popular commercial appeal. It was Blake and Rimbaud... that you could dance to.
Surprisingly, it has taken until 2010, 45 years (!) after UCLA film students Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek first starting kicking around the idea of forming a band, for a proper full-length documentary feature about The Doors to appear, Tom DiCillo's When You're Strange. You'll notice I said, "about The Doors". I felt that Oliver Stone's 1991 biopic ultimately lost its way as a true portrait of the band, because it was too myopically fixated on the Jim Morrison legend; Morrison the Lizard King, the Dionysian rock god, the drunken poet, the shaman. Yes, he was all of that (perhaps more of a showman than a shaman), but he was only 25% of the equation that made The Doors...well, The Doors. That's what I like about DiCillo's film; he doesn't gloss over the contributions of the other three musicians.
In fact, one of the things you learn in the film is that Morrison himself always insisted that all songwriting credits go to "The Doors" as an entity, regardless of which band member may have had the dominant hand in the composition of any particular song (when you consider that Morrison couldn't read a note, that's a pragmatic stance for him to take). The band's signature tune, the #1 hit "Light My Fire" was actually composed by Robbie Krieger-and was allegedly the first song he ever wrote (talk about beginner's luck). He's a great guitar player too (he was trained in flamenco, and had only been playing electric for 6 months at the band's inception). Manzarek and Densmore were no slouches either; they had a classical and jazz background, respectively. When you piece these snippets together along with Morrison's interests in poetry, literature, film and improvisational theatre (then sprinkle in a few tabs of acid) you finally begin to get a picture of why this band had such a unique vibe. They've been copied, but never equaled.
The film looks to have been a labor of love by the director. Johnny Depp provides the narration, and DiCillo has assembled some great footage; it's all well-chosen, sensibly sequenced and beautifully edited. Although there are a fair amount of clips and stories that will qualify as old hat to Doors aficionados (the "Light My Fire" performance on the Sullivan Show, the infamous Miami concert "riot", etc.), there is a treasure trove of rare footage. One fascinating (but all too brief) clip shows the band in the studio constructing the song "Wild Child" during the sessions for "The Soft Parade". The real revelation is the interwoven excerpts from Morrison's experimental 1969 film "HWY: An American Pastoral". Although it is basically a bearded Morrison driving around the desert (wearing his trademark leather pants), it's mesmerizing, surreal footage. DiCillo must have had access to a pristine master print, because it looks like it was shot last week. It wasn't until the credits rolled that I realized this wasn't one of those dreaded recreations, utilizing a lookalike. As a matter of fact, Morrison has never appeared so "alive" on film. It's eerie.

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When You re Strange, written and directed bythe award-winning Tom DiCillo, is the first featuredocumentary released on The Doors. Graced by thenarration of Johnny Depp, it carries the audiencethrough the journeys of vocalist Jim Morrison,keyboardist Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robby Krieger,and drummer John Densmore. This 90-minutepresentation features never-before-seen rare archival film,pulled from their inception in 1966 to Morrison s passing in 1971.These snapshot scenes of the band s history is as much an intimateexperience, as it is revealing.After being featured at the Sundance, Berlin, Deauville, and San Sebastian Film Festivals, music fans who didn t catch this intheaters can now relish in this extraordinary documentary. It celebrates the collaborative power of this illustrious rock quartetand their revolutionary fusion of creativity and thought-provoking rebellion.

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