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 ¡ª 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.
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.
one of the great tragedies of the show is its illustration of how the claws Walt¡¯s sunk into Jesse¡¯s brain exert a more powerful pull than Mike and Gus¡¯s treatment of Jesse as someone with potential. Walt has groomed Jesse to respond to his own guilt and shame more strongly than to straightforward affirmation, perverted his job as a teacher so they only thing Jesse is supposed to learn is Walt¡¯s authority.And somebody on Reddit responds:
¡°You are trouble. I¡¯m sorry the kid here doesn¡¯t see it, but I sure as hell do,¡± Mike tells Walt at one point. James Poniewozik asked today in Time what a fitting outcome for Walt would be at the end of Breaking Bad, whether death might be an escape compared to the torture of shame and exposure. But I wonder if focusing on retribution for Walt might distract us from a more powerful and important outcome: freedom and wholeness for his victims.
whoa, i'm seeing stronger parallels with hector salamanca now. walter is using family as an excuse for everything, simultaneously ruining his own family. hector nearly drowned and permanently traumatized one of his nephews, then told them "familia es todo". so the cousins and their undying loyalty were kind of a foreshadowing of what could happen to jesse.posted by Rory Marinich at 10:37 PM on July 25, 2012 [7 favorites]
[Mike] comes up with a reason to allow his Madrigal contact to live, apparently just because sheMike knows it's either him or Walt.panicked in a sufficiently pitiable way.has access to the methylene which will allow him to feed Walt to the DEA.
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On to your previously scheduled meth opera.
posted by Panjandrum at 8:56 PM on July 25, 2012 [5 favorites]