newcritics

When we last saw Don, he was in the glow of sunlight through the window of DC8 on his way to Los Angeles to get away from his domestic travails. It’s the primal tactic of flight when fight doesn’t work. Good old running away. After the week we have witnessed, we should all be so [...]

It’s been a week of certifiable madness.
Stock market insanity; bank and company failures on an epic scale; the dollar amount of 700 billion said with a straight face.
And now the maddening reality of the loss of Paul Newman, who embodied the sea change of generational sensibility that is rocking Don Draper’s world.
The gang at Sterling [...]

Live blogging tonight!
“God, I miss the fifties.” Roger Sterling
“I miss the blacklist.” Harry Crane
“I missed not live blogging with you all last week. Thank God my Norwegian ancestors kept me from being sad about it.” M.A.Peel
Okay, so I have now seen “The Benefactor,” where Roger and Harry had throw away lines waxing nostalgic for [...]

For all of today’s hypermobility of every kind—from the ubiquitous air travel we take for granted to the iphone culture that lets us take it all with us—we are a comparatively earth-bound people. I don’t think our society’s collective thoughts and imagination fly, not the way they did at the dawn of the sixties.
The National [...]

When last we saw the enigmatic Don Draper, he was sitting on the bottom of his living room steps on Thanksgiving, 1960; his wife and children have gone to her Dad’s for the holiday. He didn’t want to go, since he’s not really participating in his marriage or his fatherhood. But he was affected by [...]

Jo Stafford died on Wednesday. May she rest in peace in a heaven of beautiful, sultry music. My parents had a compilation album that had her “You Belong to Me,” and it was the first adult song that I learned all the words to when I was very young.
She had that agile, clear, distinctive voice, [...]

If they had walked into a bar, Kevin, Dermot, and Joe would have been no more than a trio in the long tradition of Irish jokes.
But instead, they are part of the memorable fictional world of Conor McPherson’s 2002 play Port Authority, now at the Atlantic Theater Company until June 22.
In this ferry dock waiting [...]

In celebration of this Memorial Day weekend, I attended two defining American art forms: the Broadway musical and the Hollywood blockbuster.
I saw Curtains on Broadway and Indiana Jones & the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull 12 hours apart. Even for a professional, it was pop culture overload, as each is a mad frenzy [...]

Bing Crosby’s birthday is May 2, or 3. He was born in 1903, although his tombstone says 1904 because of a mix-up. This confusion about the simplest of a man’s details is the least of the problems with his legacy.
Like the Olympian gods, he is largely forgotten and unloved today. Gary Giddins made [...]

“All About Eve is about adults, a diminishing breed in an America of perpetual, panicky adolescence.” James Wolcott’s recent sentence about Bette Davis’s crowning flick popped into my head when I heard of Charlton Heston’s passing.
Heston was the most grown-up, adult man of my cinematic youth. He didn’t have the artistry of Burt Lancaster, or [...]

I recently saw two powerful expressions of the grip that alcohol has on the national imagination and soul of the Irish: the film Kings from Tom Collins, and the play The Seafarer, by Conor McPherson.
I met a psychiatrist once who believed that the national Irish affinity for drinking was a product of centuries of oppression/emasculation [...]

The only big film I have seen is Michael Clayton, which I liked a lot. There is quite a strong blog presence against it, particularly against its structure.
ALL SPOILERS

Happy days are here again,
The skies above are clear again,
So let’s sing a song of cheer again,
Happy days are here again.

I was never a student of Samuel Beckett, Ireland’s great, bleak ultramodernist, master of black humor. When I was at college at Southampton University (England, not Long Island), one of the dons performed Krapp’s Last [...]

In a world where almost nothing shocks anyone, the news of the 28-year-old actor’s death has stunned us.
I had no idea he was so young. I watched Brokeback Mountain on HBO just last week, and was again swept away by the depth and magnitude of his performance. How could he be SO knowing about all [...]

“The Homecoming changed my life. Before the play, I thought words were just the vessles of meaning; after it, I saw them as weapons of defense. Before, I thought theatre was about the spoken; after, I understood the eloquence of the unspoken.”
John Lahr, The New Yorker
“But like most great art The Homecoming operates on a [...]

Dan Eisenberg of Cinemathematics put out a call for a one-day Blog-a-thon on It’s a Wonderful Life. He wants people to either explain what all the fuss is about, or agree that it could be added to Mary and Yale’s Academy of the Overrated (joining Gustav Mahler, Isak Dinesen, Karl Jung, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Lenny [...]

Dave Brubeck brought jazz back to 52nd street last Wednesday at The Paley Center for Media. He came for an evening to look at how television has captured his work over the last fifty years.
We watched clips from the heyday of live fifties tv, seeing the young, earnest pencil-tied Dave Brubeck Quartet in [...]

Writers of sketch comedy were the focus of two events at The Paley Center for Media this week, which by happenstance became the week television writers went on strike. Irony strikes again. Luckily talking about what they do crossed no picket lines.
The first event featured the the huge talents of Upright Citizens Brigade, Matt Besser, [...]

It’s M.A.Peel here, reporting in from Comedy Central, the one where you don’t have to worry about the writers going on strike. FINALLY we will learn what the purest moments of comedy are for bloggers of every ilk across the blogosphere . . . or other things somewhat approximating that idea.

Nov. 11
LazyEyeTheatre’s [...]

When I was a kid it confused and bothered me that All Saints’ Day comes before All Souls. I knew that Halloween was the vigil of a commemoration of the dead, and I didn’t understand how it could leap over this Saints thing.
Then it became more clear that the “hallowed” of all Hallows Eve means [...]

The world situation is relentlessly grim, the national political scene is discouraging, and the Mets go into the history books as one of the all-time greatest collapses of a team during one season.
To offer some relief from this reality, Newcritics is hosting a comedy blog-a-thon November 6 to 11 to coincide with the New York [...]

Who is Don Draper, besides being Dick Whitman?
On the one hand he is a self-made man who has ably demonstrated Galt’s creed: “I swear by my life, and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”
Just ask [...]

Last Thursday was the great Mad Men fake out, when AMC, without warning, ran a repeat. But we will not be deterred in our journey to see “where the hell this series is going.”
Last week I was interested in how MM was channeling some of the great film directors, from Stahl to Sirk to Lynch. [...]

AMC faked us out, and is running a repeat episode. For us live bloggers, that’s just beat. We’ll show up when the next new episode shows up.

“. . . and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn [...]

How oddly fitting that Princess Diana and Mother Teresa are connected to each other in the world’s memory because they died six days apart in 1997. The coverage of Diana’s death made for a somewhat memorable Labor Day weekend that year, which then rolled right into the coverage of Mother Teresa.
And now, this week, we [...]

I like television with episode titles. Titles give support to the themes of specific shows within larger story arcs. They can be very straightforward, like “Evan” of Miami Vice, or more editorial, like “Out Where the Buses Don’t Run” from its season 2. They can be playful, like the Remington Steele titles that all used [...]

Heat. Serrrrious heat. Heavy sultry steamy air. Beads of sweat luxuriating down the small of the back, bodies crushed together—
It’s another August day in the New York subway.
But Thursday night, it’s also part of a repressed tension just beneath the sleek, cool, color-saturated landscape on AMC. Mad Men is the perfect deep summer escapist [...]

What the hell is a Hallow?
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Didn’t that title bother anyone? It’s one of the most widely known books on the planet now, and the title has a word that I doubt many people can define.
And shouldn’t it be “deadly” hallows? “Deathly” sounds wrong there.
I wanted to see [...]

I like Alan Sepinwall’s take on Saving Grace very much: ”Is the world ready for an R-rated drama about angels? For a gritty crime drama that’s one part NYPD Blue for every part Touched by an Angel? Since the show in question, TNT’s new Saving Grace, stars an acting force of nature, I guess we [...]

In the beginning, there were men. Actual men, in a litany that includes N.W. Ayer, J. Walter Thompson, David Ogilvy, Leo Burnett, John Orr Young & Raymond Rubicam, Mac Dane, Ned Doyle, & William Bernbach. As individuals they created an industry that is the epicenter of the American economy: advertising. Many of the [...]

The essay simply entitled “July 8, 1822″ in Christopher Morley’s The Powder of Sympathy caught my eye because I would be returning from vacation on July 8, 2007. When I realized it was about Italy, I was more intrigued, since that was my destination.
And so I read:
“It is to-day a hundred years since that sultry [...]

The AFI updated—by repolling—its 100 Greatest American Films list on the 10th anniversary of when they first did it (and following all the sub-lists that the original spawned: best lines, best romances, best heroes/villains.)
It’s a list that is institutional and MOTR by nature, and as such, has limited value. But what is fascinating [...]

“You and my dad, you two ran North Jersey.”
“Hmph. That’s nice.”
Gandolfini is at his hulking, ominous best in the penultimate scene of the series finale, when Tony goes to see Junior in the state facility. He’s trying to see to things—to make sure Junior’s stash goes where it “should,” to Bobby’s children (and [...]

The television has recently been awash with the Ocean’s series, from the network premiere of Ocean’s 12 on CBS, to the 1960 Ocean’s 11 on AMC, and the 2001 on TBS, all leading up to June 8’s release of Ocean’s 13, which happens to be right between the last two Sopranos episodes.
This recent [...]