MetaFilter posts tagged with AMC

the best little boy in the world

gerryblog — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 12:28:35 -0800

Legendary Mad Men blog "Mad Style" sets out to explain Bob Benson to a twenty-first century that is apparently ill-prepared to understand him. Here is what we surmise about Bob Benson, based on the above: He’s an upper-middle class over-achiever from a family of them but he’s more than likely estranged from them because he’s gay, which partially explains why he doesn’t work for the family firm and also explains why he can be so flexible about whether his father is alive or not. Like a lot of gay men, he is fascinated by people who work in a creative field, even if he’s not creative himself. Like a lot of well-closeted gay men, he is a smooth liar from years of experience; very good at fooling the eye with distractions and cover stories. But because he’s constantly spinning tales he can’t always keep track of them and a close observer can occasionally pick up inconsistencies. Like a lot of over-achieving well-closeted gay men, Bob is operating under “Best Little Boy in the World” syndrome, a term which comes from the seminal coming-out autobiography of the same name, published in 1973, and so well describes a certain type of middle-to-upper-class gay man that it’s considered an honest-to-god measurable syndrome today. Basically, it comes down to this: there is a certain strain of gay men who have an overwhelming urge to be over-achievers in all areas of their lives. In school, they are A-students and members of every club and organization that will have them. They are athletic, scholarly, friendly, and helpful to everyone around them, constantly seeking excellence and popularity in order to deflect any questions as to why he doesn’t date. They are always extremely clean-cut, if not downright conservative in appearance. They quite often stay in school to get advanced degrees because the atmosphere allows them to continue to put off any questions about their personal lives or plans outside their education or careers. After school, they throw themselves into their careers with the same fervency they used to get through school. If a gay man is both a Best Little Boy and estranged from his family, he is more than likely an extremely lonely person; possibly even someone who’s bad at reading personal cues and engaging in emotional intimacy. These types of gay men still exist, but there were far more of them back in the days when staying in the closet was less of a personal choice and more of a necessity.

Traveller's Tales Presents...

OverlappingElvis — Wed, 01 May 2013 09:16:38 -0800

LEGO Breaking Bad: The Video Game

They're not the same men

Potomac Avenue — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 11:06:12 -0800

Mad Men Season 6 (and simultaneous saturation coverage) begins again tonight. As the show winds down, along with the decade that defined it, the 1960s, critics are wondering "What's the best ending for the best series on TV? Can it survive the onset of the 1970s?"

I really wanna lose three pounds.

shakespeherian — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 11:31:09 -0800

Mad Men + Mean Girls = Mean Mad Men.

A chat with Mark Eitzel and Neil Hamburger

porn in the woods — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 09:09:01 -0800

Mope-rock titan Mark Eitzel (former frontman of American Music Club) gets some constructive criticism of his excellent new LP Don't Be A Stranger from "America's $1 Funnyman" Neil Hamburger. This is the sixth video of Eitzel's Life Lessons video series where he solicits career advice. After having a reformed AMC crumble after two great albums last decade, as well as suffering a heart attack in 2011, it's a treat to see Eitzel's fit and working again.

The Breaking Bad Art Project

Egg Shen — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 15:18:38 -0800

The Breaking Bad Art Project is on exhibit at Gallery 1988 in Los Angeles through August 26. The acclaimed television drama has also inspired derivative works in other media.

‎"[T]he only real way to do it is to tell an honest human story, but to do it in a way that people feel like they haven’t seen before."

Rory Marinich — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 20:39:27 -0800

A fascinating interview with Vince Gilligan, showrunner of Breaking Bad. The questions are as excellent as the answers.

This points to that quality of improvisation with the work you’re doing. In a traditional crime show, like “CSI,” if it were a big band, it’s a big band working off charts. The arrangements are very tightly controlled. And what I sense with “Breaking Bad” is a sense of, I don’t know, “John Coltrane on acid.” You have this sense of improvisation where you go with things you know, where you tell the story the length it needs to be told. You’re inspired collectively by a moment and you decide to go deeper into that moment. You’re in essence leading a parallel life with your characters and letting those characters take you where they want to go — not necessarily where the dictates of commercial convention say they have to go.

Meanwhile, Alan Sepinwall asks actors Bryan Cranston (2) and Aaron Paul about some of their most iconic moments on the show. Other highlights:

It finally dawned on me that TV is about stasis, and it is about life, whereas our lives are about change. We get older with every passing moment. We change in our lives, we change our hairstyles. We change our outlooks on life, our political views sometimes. TV by design has to have a certain amount of stasis to it, because the goal in television is to have a TV show that lasts for many decades. But it’s hard to have characters on your TV show change when you are trying to provide a safe haven for the viewers, a familiar place for the viewers to come back to week in and week out. And, to that end, when you have a cop show, and a cop shoots a perp, that rule of stasis, that self-imposed stricture of stasis, dictates that a particular act of violence doesn’t resonate too strongly with the character, certainly within the body of the episode. The cop sits around with his boss, after the shooting, and the boss says, “You did what you had to do.” We’ve all seen that scene. But the next episode, it’s like it never happened.

and:

I hope I get through my whole life and am able to honestly say this: “I have never Googled myself. And I’ve never Googled ‘Breaking Bad.’” I don’t do it, not because I’m not interested, but because the opposite is true. I am desperately interested, but I know that I will disappear down some rabbit hole if I were to do that. And so while we have this amazing opportunity to listen in to these Twitter feeds and get this instant reaction, it would become a very dangerous sort of an echo chamber.

and:

Kubrick’s one of my all-time favorites. The other great quote, that I use all the time from him, was somebody asked him, “What about the space station, and using the Blue Danube throughout that sequence? Just genius! Why did you do it that way?” And Kubrick thought about it, and said, “Showmanship.” It was my favorite answer of all time.

It took braaaaaaains.

Artw — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 11:47:09 -0800

Why George Romero rejected The Walking Dead to make The Zombie Autopsies

Sympathy for Gus

Horselover Phattie — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 12:33:37 -0800

Sympathy for Gus: Giancarlo Esposito talks 'Breaking Bad' (Here be spoilers). Vince Gilligan (series creator) also has a few things to say about season four and the final season of Breaking Bad. Also, won't you be my neighbor?

But it's just so American!

cashman — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 13:41:06 -0800

AMC's Hell on Wheels is an upcoming series created by Joe and Tony Gayton, centered around the building of the Transcontinental Railroad. Joe: "I think what a lot of people think of when they think about the Transcontinental Railroad is the contribution of the Chinese immigrants." "But, it’s just so American". So the show focuses on railroad construction from the East, and the Chinese laborers story? They "ended up getting excised". Unable to flat out say something like "Everyone felt very strongly that we needed a white character or a part-white, part-Indian character to carry a contemporary white audience through this project" (a writer who adopted a Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee for HBO films), the Gaytons stumbled through trying to explain it in any other way possible: “And just, budget-wise and time-wise…we could really only concentrate on one side of [the railroad building], and that’s probably why we, you know, that’s why we chose the [emanating from the East Coast] Union Pacific as opposed to the [emanating from the West Coast] Central Pacific.” “The genesis of the railroad started in the East,” “It was Abraham Lincoln’s idea, and we’ve likened it to JFK, you know, saying, ‘We are going to make the we are going to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade’.” “And it was very similar. So it just seemed a good starting point.” But, he promised, “The Central Pacific will be a hint in the show. I mean, we will know that they are out there, building.”

Killing It

(Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 05:23:07 -0800

A few nights ago, AMC aired the final episode of the first season of the formerly critically acclaimed television series, The Killing. Based off of the highly regarded Danish television series Forbrydelsen, the show centered around two homicide detectives investigating the murder of a seemingly innocent high school girl in Seattle. Heavily marketed with the tagline "Who Killed Rosie Larsen?", the show's finale sparked a nearly unprecedented degree of outrage among television critics, with some going so far as to call it "the worst season finale of all time." [assume SPOILERS in all links and below the fold] Much of the ire came from the critics' assumption - and growing desire - that Rosie's killer would be revealed in the season finale, as was the case in the Danish version. Instead, the writers included a final plot twist that cast doubt on the guilt of the show's suspected perp and implicated the show's most likeable character in a (possible) mass conspiracy. Reaction was harsh. Bill Simmons in Grantland: "I can't remember a single show damaging a network's brand this severely, to the point that AMC either needs to apologize, offer the entire Breaking Bad series on DVD for 85 percent off, or even publicly distance itself from the show the same way a sports team distances itself from a star player who does something horrible." Alan Sepinwall at hitfix.com: "[the finale] is a mess, and an insult to the audience who have stuck around for the last three months. And based on my conversation with Sud, it sounds like we're getting more of the same next year. So this will be the last review I write of The Killing, because this will be the last time I watch The Killing. Because I have no interest in going forward with a show that treats its audience this way. Andy Greenwald in New York Magazine: ". . . all of this led to a finale that spat in the face of convention, logic, and the audience. There was tone of condescension about this entire project from the start — all the talk of defying audience expectations, of how the writers would sort of 'figure out' the killer’s identity as they went along. All of this reeked of poorly thought out elitism, like a college freshman clutching a half-read copy of Siddartha and explaining to everyone how they just 'don’t get it, man.'" Todd VanDerWerff in the LA Times: ". . . one of the most frustrating season finales in TV history." And the Onion AV club, in another critical review, outlines the show's various red herrings, unlikely coincidences, and fabulous plot points that don't add up. In the midst of such vitriol, showrunner Veena Sud gives an interview in which she states "We never said you'll get closure at the end of season 1. We said from the very beginning this is the anti-cop cop show. It's a show where nothing is what it seems, so throw out expectations. We will not tie up this show in a bow. There are plenty of shows that do that, in 45 minutes or whatever amount of time, where that is expected and the audience can rest assured that at the end of blank, they will be happy and they can walk away from their TV satisfied. This is not that show." Somehow, though, the showrunner's claim that the audience would not get closure did not reach Ginia Bellafante at the New York Times, who wrote on Sunday evening that An Obsessive Killer is Revealed in a Stylish Whodunit. Accused of writing a review without even actually watching the final episode, Bellafante dug in and wrote a defense of her article, stating that it is clear to her who the killer is.

Brutal Economics of Cable TV

fearfulsymmetry — Sun, 29 May 2011 07:34:48 -0800

The success of The Walking Dead, paradoxically, has left the network with an unusual dilemma. Like the executives of Mad Men’s Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, AMC is facing an existential question: How do I grow my business without sacrificing who I am? The Zombies at AMC’s Doorstep. TL;DR version: How AMC Explains the Brutal Economics of Cable Television

We get to see how the 60s ends!

crossoverman — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 02:58:47 -0800

After some tough negotiations, AMC and Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner have come to an agreement to resume production on the series, which has been renewed for two - and possibly three - more seasons.

Breaking Bad Locations in Albuquerque

box — Mon, 03 May 2010 17:46:44 -0800

Breaking Bad Locations in Albuquerque (Flickr photoset, via the AV Club.)

Welcome Lawbreakers!

saulgoodman — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 13:18:13 -0800

DUI? Dealing Drugs? Better Call Saul! Have you or someone you know been affected by the tragedy of Wayfarer Flight 515? SAUL CAN HELP! Also related: Check out Saul's philanthropic causes. [Not in any sense a self-link.]

B-Movie TV

billysumday — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 09:32:05 -0800

"Bikinis! Monsters! Motorcycles! Welcome to BMC, your new go-to site for B-movies by the likes of John Carpenter (Dark Star) and Roger Corman (Saga of the Viking Women). Now online and in full screen, watch unsung classics like Asylum by Psycho screenwriter Robert Block or Corridors of Blood with the inimitable Christopher Lee. Want to see international icons before they made it big? How about The Ruthless Four, a spaghetti Western starring Klaus Kinski."

Limit Your Exposure : In depth annalysis of Mad Men

Mick — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 10:13:53 -0800

AMC's Mad Men is the best show on telivision that no one is watching (now that The Wire has ended), it's the most adult, most stylish, best written show on television at the moment. And we say "adult" in the sense that it's subtle and complex, not in the "there's a lot of sex" sense (although there's plenty of sex).. Here is some outstanding in-depth analysis of the first episodes of season 3 (spoilers aplenty).

What a great TV night!

jonmc — Wed, 12 Dec 2001 18:01:09 -0800

What a great TV night! The Wild Bunch on Encore followed by The Searchers on AMC. I have a sixer of Guiness and a sixer of PBR in the fridge, so before tonight is out, I'm sure I'll have an urge to put on a cowboy hat, mount up and shoot me some varmints. All kidding aside, some nights the TV gods just seem to smiling down on me.

AMC to add commercials?

kindall — Sun, 22 Jul 2001 09:59:10 -0800

AMC to add commercials? American Movie Classics, a cable TV channel which has for sixteen years been showing classic films without commercial interruptions, is considering adding commercial breaks to movies as early as this year. (The channel already shows commercials before and after movies and in its documentaries, but until now has kept the movies themselves intact.) If you're a movie buff and are distressed by this possibility, let AMC know about it. (Personally, I think this is a bad idea, if only because it will likely cost them lots and lots of viewers.)