Category Writing

SouthLAnd: Taking the Heat

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The greatest SouthLAnd writers have distinctive styles and voices.

This week’s writer, Heather Zuhlke, excels at texture; the connective tissue between characters, between scenes, between themes. She can give you all you need to know about a person, a relationship, a situation, with just a few careful words and moments.

That skill with texture was key to Heat, as this episode was all about interactions; the webs that link one person to another, and how those bonds hold up when the heat, the pressure, is cranked all the way up. Those brief, fragmentary moments were even more important than usual in a show that thrives on an aggressively existential insistence on the importance of the present moment, and the irrelevance of the past and the future.

Whether it was Cooper and the girl who brought him muffins, or Cooper and Steele, or Cooper and the veteran, or Sherman, continuing his alienating trend of being a total dick to everyone except the people who would actually deserve it, or Bryant, desperate to connect with his own son, and instead connecting with the dying son of a gangster via a toy Lego cop — each situation was short, brutal, and revelatory, thanks to Zuhlke’s absolute mastery of character through action. It sounds obvious, since that is the goal of TV drama (of all drama, all writing) — but it’s not. It’s hard to get right even some of the time — Zuhlke nailed every single beat from start to finish.

The acting in this episode was exemplary. As you can tell from the list above, Cudlitz had a lot to do, and he did it brilliantly. Ben McKenzie is fearless this season, utterly willing to throw off Sherman’s idealistic former self in favor of his transition to a hardened, jaded douchebag. Hatosy is great as always, keeping Bryant’s combustibility in check, but only just. He effortlessly conveys the fact that Bryant has much more experience, and is likely a much better cop, than Sherman.

I haven’t mentioned Regina King yet, because she deserves special focus for this episode, which was really all about Lydia’s much welcome return to being an awesomely powerful powerhouse of a woman. From the opening flashback when we see her start to kick the ass of a kickboxer in a street brawl, to her first shot doing insane pushups, through her beautifully depicted banter with Dorian Missick, King owned this episode. She’s a natural match for Zuhlke’s style, able to convey extraordinary amounts of emotional information with the barest of words or gestures. Her joy at her comeback made the ending all the more devastating.

A quick word about that. SouthLAnd excels at dropping you into unknown trouble and making you feel it, instantaneously — the moment contains all you need to know for it to f**k you up emotionally. Earlier in the episode, the show made a rare minor misstep with Mendoza’s story. It could have been the character being too new and unfamiliar, it could have been that we don’t connect with Sherman’s loyalty to him, or it could just be the precise sleaziness of the performance. Whatever the reason, there were only two moments in the arc that truly worked: Sammy gaving the Lego cop to the dying kid (at which point it started raining on my face for some reason), and the very end of the arc, when Sherman is left alone in the hospital corridor — utter isolation that definitely hit home. Those moments aside, that story just didn’t have the emotional power to jump start our feelings.

The same cannot be said for the ending, which was horribly savage in the quietest of ways. Classic SouthLAnd. We didn’t even know what was truly happening. We didn’t need to. Regina King’s heartbreak was backed up by everything that had happened to her earlier arriving in that scene like an emotional freight train — that’s brilliant writing. The moment was flawlessly conveyed, and the previous 40 minutes slammed into you while you were down. King is an extraordinary actress, and why she doesn’t have a truckload of Emmys at this point is beyond me.

The texture that was key to this week’s script was also there in Dana Gonzales’s lighting. While Jimmy Muro is the undisputed master of capturing that Los Angeles light, Gonzales has been quietly excelling in a number of SouthLAnd episodes (most notably, God’s Work). He can harness extraordinary early morning golden hazes (he shot the golf course like an alien planet shrouded in sentient light), and he can wrestle lens flares out of literally any shot — the patrol officer’s badge when Lydia and Ruben walked up the hill to their first case, or the patrol car lights on a cloudy day after Cooper was shot at. Gonzales is a legendary DP.

Heat continued the season five trend of being tighter, more compact. Sometimes, that constricted the emotional responses a little; mostly, it accentuated them. It’s simply the rawest, most real show on TV right now. Challenging, uncompromising, and brilliant.

SouthLAnd Season 5: Hats And Bats

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We hold cops to a higher standard because we give them a gun and a badge.

Officer Ben Sherman, facing stark realities

Officer Ben Sherman, facing stark realities

Only problem with that is, we recruit them from the human race.

With that opening voiceover and freezeframe, SouthLAnd started its fifth season by dropping us into hell without a parachute. Each season gets tighter, hits harder, jabs more lethally and precisely, knocks you down with even more viscerality. Hats And Bats continued this tradition with blade-sharpened verve and ferociousness, while, as always, somehow finding time to inject genuinely heartbreaking emotion. It brings you to your knees, then breaks your heart.

This episode was written by the exemplary Jonathan Lisco, directed by the legendary Chris Chulack, and lit by lighting genius and maestro Jimmy Muro. Lisco’s scripts always carry his signature: an extraordinary sense of intelligence and precision, whether he’s serving up something shocking, hardcore emotional, funny, or just general truths about humanity. It sounds casual when it’s written out in a list like that: but there’s nothing casual about it. It takes hard work and skill to pull off. Lisco delivers all those things in elegant scripts that just flow. There’s always a powerful core of great character work that keeps the script rolling; all those other elements are subtly intergated on the fly. Which just happens to be the definition of great writing.

For example, the scene in the swimming pool/bath house: utterly horrific, over so quickly we never know what was going on – but it’s a complex, almost wordless character moment for Sherman and Bryant. Then, later in the episode, their scene dealing with the old lady whose sister was murdered (which included a nice shout out to writer/supervising producer Cheo Coker, who moved from SouthLAnd to NCIS: LA), was another example of the scene getting in, getting out, but slamming you with serious emotions on the way. And Lisco was also responsible for one of the funniest lines of the show in all five seasons:

Jerry: “We have a permit.”

Cooper: “To be a dipshit?”

Of course, Chulack  and Muro killed it. Of course they did. They shot and lit it with brutal, pared-down style, keeping the camera close and low to the ground. It was the kind of lighting and directing that almost stripped itself away, making you feel as though you were immersed in nothing other than the rawest of truths in every beat, every scene.

Which brings us to the acting.

Damn.

This may be the finest ensemble in TV right now.

Ben McKenzie and Shawn Hatosy nailed the fractious, buddy/brotherly relationship between Sherman and Bryant. McKenzie portrayed Sherman’s unease at his newest level of celebrity, while Hatosy was utterly compelling as a father under huge pressure, dealing with a crazy ex-wife, barely controlling his rage from boiling over. Lisco’s script had Sherman and Bryant butting heads, cracking jokes, having each other’s backs, and McKenzie and Hatosy handled every single beat with extreme presence, energy and truth. Regina King showed us a mother barely holding it together as she dealt with the immense stress of being a single mom, as well as the immense stress of being a detective; King was incredible, as she always is.

And then there was Cudlitz.

He gave us an astonishing spectrum of emotions in this episode. Lisco gave him great material to work with — having to be even more hard-ass than usual with his newest boot, an ex-military powerhouse with attitude to spare — as well as peeling back the layers to show the lonely soul beneath the surface who just craves companionship, and, maybe, even though he’d never admit it, love. Brilliant work from Cudlitz from start to finish.

Dewey. Yep.

Tommy Howell is a legend, and it’s great to see him promoted from recurring to regular.

On every level, this really is a show that grabs you and doesn’t let you go. It makes you feel like it just threw you off a balcony. There’s a vertiginous sense of falling that pulses through this show — that dread is part of its power, because anything can happen at any time.

All in all, this was a truly fantastic start to what promises to be an amazing fifth season for SouthLAnd. It’s a show that just keeps on getting better, season after season. That’s a rarity in TV drama. This show really is one of a kind; can’t say thank you to TNT enough for believing in it too.

Random witness statements:

  • Few things are more pleasing at this point than hearing”hey numbnuts!”
  • Jeez, Sherman — Sammy just really wants to clean up some blood this episode, okay?
  • Coker
  • “Welcome to the info age. Instant riots — just add tweets.”
  • So much screaming in this episode
  • Bryant on Sherman’s new haircut: “They remaking Taxi Driver?”

100/10: Massive Attack’s 100th Window –10th Anniversary

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February 10th marks the 10th anniversary of Massive Attack’s controversial and extraordinary album, 100th Window.

100th Window

The group, a trio comprised of Robert “3D” Del Naja, Grant “Daddy G” Marshall and Andrew “Mushroom” Vowles, had essentially imploded during the intense recording sessions for the previous album, Mezzanine. After 1997, when Mezzanine dropped, Mushroom had left the band entirely, while G was slowly but surely drifting away.

Mezzanine: intensity very much pictured

Mezzanine: intensity very much pictured

D was driving the whole thing, leading the post-Mezzanine sessions with fellow Bristol band Lupine Howl, creating long, guitar-heavy workouts that sounded like Mezzanine 2.0. But the years were passing, and the magic wasn’t happening for D. By 2002, it was just D and longtime collaborator Neil “no nickname” Davidge in the studio, creating the digital dreams and textures of what would become 100th Window. It call came together in a sudden six month period during 2002, and in September of that year, D announced that 100th Window would be released the following February, 2003.

D in the Butterfly Caught video

D in the Butterfly Caught video

Even though it was for all intents and purposes created by just D and Davidge, 100th Window is possibly the most “Massive Attack-y” Massive Attack album. It revealed that D’s vision was in a lot of ways the soul and consciousness of the band’s/brand’s sound. Despite the inexplicable reviews that labeled it the band’s darkest and coldest album yet, 100th Window is in fact an incredibly warm and gorgeous album, full of Del Naja’s digital lullabies, beautifully layered textures and atmospherics, where all the instruments and sounds and even the vocals were hypnotically choreographed and manipulated into a distinctively Bristolian yet utterly otherworldly landscape that existed in a mesmerizing dream-time.

G and D

G and D

It had menace, of course. It evoked flickering neon lights in deserted tower blocks on the edge of lonely cities late at night. It had relentless, messed-up beats. It glitched and stuttered like neurons firing when you’re deep asleep. Naturally, the basslines were… massive: sinuous, streamlined, slinking, beating like alien hearts. Sometimes the album was simply beautiful and pure.

It worked whispering to your soul via headphones, or blasting earth-shaking beats in front of 20,000 people.

It also saved me. It came out the day before a cataclysmic event in my life, one which reset everything, ending life as I knew it up to that point, leaving me in a new, empty wasteland. For a long time, there was nothing. I couldn’t watch movies, or TV. Or read books. Or listen to music.

What came back first was writing; that was the life raft that saved me. Words came out of the darkness and took my hands and showed them how to make more words. And then came 100th Window, which I’d been holding onto, waiting for a time when I could really hear it. I listened to it, over and over again, writing furiously all the while, as all my emotional systems came back online. I listened to it as the sky turned magic hour dark blue and held in a twilight stasis, the light lingering in the west until dark finally claimed it, bringing stars. It became the soundtrack for the rest of the year, as I used writing to change my life, to change everything. I remade my world while 100th Window still played, still kept consuming me and my imagination and my soul.

It’s a set of tracks to lead you out of darkness. The title came from the admittedly paranoid (and classically Massive Attack) idea that no matter how impregnable you think your defenses are, something can always get through (if you put bars over 99 windows, someone will break into the 100th window). But it works the other way too. You may think all your paths are blocked, that nothing can get you through this. But even if 99 paths are blocked, the 100th is there waiting for you to take it, follow it, and find your way to wherever you need to be.

Thank you, Robert Del Naja and Neil Davidge, for creating this extraordinary piece of music.

Days Of Blood And Starlight: Unstoppable Momentum & Atmospheric Power AKA THIS BOOK WILL OWN YOU

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This is that rarest of creatures: a sequel that bests the original. Just to put that in context, Daughter Of Smoke And Bone was one of the greatest YA novels ever written, a burningly brilliant and resonant story that seared the senses with its gorgeous intensity.

Days Of Blood And Starlight is better.

Yep, I said it.

Days Of Blood And Starlight

Days Of Blood And Starlight

Laini Taylor proves herself to be an extraordinary resurrectionist. Creating a new literary creature more powerful than any before it. She has upped the emotional intensity, sharpened the sarcasm and brutal wit, exponentially increased the sheer B-movie monster awesomeness of it all, supercharged the zingers and snark, and, somehow, impossibly, she has taken her incredible gift of subtle, moving and fearsome character work to a whole new level. And of all this is presented in a glittering, hypnotic and sensual style that steals into the senses and makes you something other than what you were.

What the hell, Laini Taylor? How did you get so much more awesome than you were before? How did you take your huge canvas from Smoke And Bone and then make us realize that it was just a tiny corner of the vast universe you were actually working on? How did you trick us into believing Smoke And Bone was a deluxe, widescreen theater experience (which was so much bigger than anything else we were reading), when really it was like an YouTube video on an iPhone 3 compared to the IMAX scale of Blood And Starlight?

How did you change the way I looked at YA, and at books and writing in general… And then change it AGAIN with this?

Days Of Blood And Starlight (UK Cover)

Days Of Blood And Starlight (UK Cover)

The expansion from book one to book two is even more impressive when you consider that the story is much more focused, in time, in place, in intensity. And yet Taylor spins magical realms from the smallest of details. Those realms are not merely other worlds, but also emotional truths, physical realities. Her writing is heady, stunning, and mesmeric. These are characters and worlds that once you inhabit them, inhabit you. Putting this book down is an impossibility; your heart and soul just will not allow it.

Plot is all in Blood And Starlight, so I shall give none of it away here. All you need to know is that the stakes are radically higher, the emotions are turbo-charged and relentless, the atmospheric power of the novel is off the charts, and Taylor keeps everything tight, controlled and focused with extreme screenplay skill. Not a single word is wasted; everything charges forward, in the manner of an exhilarating but terrifying rollercoaster. It’s almost too much to take in because you power through it so quickly. The incredible views flash past because there’s no stopping the momentum.

Just read it. Love it. And then wait, helplessly, for the next one, your mind and body singing, reeling, resonating. And good luck starting any books after this; because after this, nothing is quite the same.

Rating: Five out of five chimeras

ARROW: Deadly Precision

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Yeah, I know, my title sounds like a Steven Seagal movie. But trust me. If you’re not watching The CW’s new show Arrow, you should be.

The Hooded Vigilante

The Hooded Vigilante

Adapted from DC’s Green Arrow source material, Arrow takes those classic pulpy comic elements and brilliantly locks them into blisteringly precise action, gritty atmosphere, edgy storylines, and CW-style relationship drama. This is a high velocity show that relishes its comic book origins even as it transcends them.

Also, it has John Barrowman.

Exec producers Greg Berlanti, Marc Guggenheim and Andrew Kreisberg have crafted a gloriously entertaining, moves-like-a-bullet (or should that be arrow?) narrative that revels in its darkly wrought drama, and isn’t afraid to have an incredibly stylized blast.

As the show’s star, Stephen Amell, often tweets… thwick.

Better than Katniss

Better than Katniss

The set-up is this: billionaire playboy Oliver Queen is lost at sea when the yacht he’s on with his girlfriend’s sister, and his father, disappears during a storm. Five years later, out of nowhere, he reappears and returns to his home in Starling City.

But he’s not the same.

The show deftly blends flashbacks to the devastating accident, the aftermath, and the mysterious island on which Oliver was stranded for those five years. These scenes are interpersed with his present day reality: spreading fear and justice as Starling City’s bow-and-arrow-wielding hooded vigilante. He’s cleaning up the streets, following the plan set out for him by his father, who gave him a notebook full of names: those who deserved justice. The show has morphed satisfyingly quickly from attack-of-the-week into deeper, more challenging and dimensional territory, as conspiracies unfurl, and complex relationships become more apparent.

Laurel Lance (Katie Cassidy) and Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell)

Laurel Lance (Katie Cassidy) and Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell)

Berlanti, Guggenheim and Kreisberg, like a team of superhero lawyers, have a killer eye for hiring directors, including the always legendary Guy Norman Bee (also known for directing Supernatural, SouthLAnd and Revolution). The action is blistering and razor-sharp; the shooting, lighting and editing is hyper-stylized, hyper-real, full of comic book angles, stark shadows, and blinding light.

But it’s all rooted in the characters.

Oliver Queen, the dilletante turned superhero, played with Tom Cruise-like movie star presence by Amell. Laurel Lance, an idealistic lawyer and Queen’s ex, the girl he betrayed by sleeping with her sister, leading to the sister’s horrible death, is perfectly played with soulful, sly sensuality and sharp-edged grief by Katie Cassidy. Queen’s sidekick John Diggle is given gravitas and no-nonsense attitude by David Ramsey. Queen’s sister Thea is played to perfection by Willa Holland, who nails the complex emotions that drive that character. Colin Donnell does a great job as Queen’s beleaguered best friend Tommy. And the mysterious Huntress, AKA Helena Bertinelli, who is played with tormented, broken-hearted angst by the superb Jessica De Gouw.

Oliver and Helena, AKA, The Huntress

Oliver and Helena, AKA, The Huntress

These actors are all brilliant; luckily, the scripts are equally  fantastic, thanks to the powerhouse writers room. The scripts are punchy, sharp, shot through with snark, easily balancing the past and the present, emotions and thrills, complexity and the simple pleasure of watching the vigilante deliver expertly choreographed smackdowns.

The Hooded Man

The Hooded Man

In short, this show is tremendously entertaining. Off the charts. A high octane blend off pop culture awesomeness.

Watch it.