Something to be attacked
Now that The Sopranos is on a long break again, I was kind of hoping that the new Showcase series "The Brotherhood"
playing on the cable here would be as good, and judging from the first
two episodes, it just might be. (Watch the first few episodes of The
Sopranos or any other great show again, and you'll be surprised how bad
those first steps were. Any show always takes a while to find its
proper shape and flow.)
A few years ago there was a network show about the same overall theme, "Line of Fire", which I thought was really good but unfortunately got canceled early. (Ever since that show, I have used the line "and that's that about that" in many occasions, just like the head mobster.) Contrary to my expectations, The Brotherhood is not about the Westies, but instead it depicts the wacky and violent antics of the Irish organized crime in the grimy Rhode Island, apparently far from the leafy suburbs where the Griffin family lives. And let's just say that the show has obviously been "inspired" by The Sopranos in more than just a few ways. Of course there are also differences in that, for example, instead of going to Bada Bing, the tough Irish mobsters congregate in a remote Irish bar near a highway. The most important difference is that of the two brothers who are the main characters of the story, one is a politician (a state congressman, in fact) while the other is a renegade hardcase mobster and enforcer who has returned from a seven year absense on the lam.
I don't know if I am going out on a limb here and I might be totally mistaken in this, but I think that one important theme of this show is that in many ways, backroom politics and organized crime are very similar and require similar skills and attitudes. To support this theory, I offer the scene that was near the end of the second episode. The two brothers stood together in a room, and the mobster brother said to the politician brother that you know, perhaps they are not that different after all, to which the politician angrily responded that he is nothing like him. I guess I'll have to keep watching the show to see if my "hunch" is correct!
Sometimes I wish I was more media literate so that I would understand these things better. For example, last night we watched the movie "Proof", which is about the nerdy daughter (quite well played by Gwyneth Paltrow) of the recently deceased famous mathematician (Anthony Hopkins, in the exact same role that he plays in every non-Hannibal movie) who had been mentally ill for the last five years. Man, all those top mathematicians and their beautiful minds hunting for proofs, they just can't be like normal people. The countless notebooks left behind by the late mathematician are just nonsense, but one of them turns out to contain a brilliant proof for an unspecified but important mathematical conjecture about prime numbers.
After putting all the dramatic pieces in place, the plot twist is that the daughter claims that she wrote this proof, not her dad, who could only produce schizophrenic gibberish. But how to, you know, prove this? And do we even care? A female mathematician... what's next, a talking banana? In the end when everything has turned out fine, and the daughter and the math graduate student (Jake Gyllenhaal) start stepping through the proof together, my wife turned to me and asked "Is she talking about the proof... or her life?" Hot damn, woman, you are freaking me out even worse than when you casually noted that "Neo" is anagram for "one".
To improve my media literacy skills, I read "Planet Simpson" by Chris Turner. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that this book is not a collection of episode recaps written by some fanboy who thinks he is really funny and watching Simpsons makes him edgy and cool and all "anti-authoritarian", but the book actually contained genuinely interesting ideas and observations and I learned quite a lot of stuff in it.
The overall style is somewhat reminiscent of Douglas Coupland, who provided the foreword for the book. The book is mainly organized to go through the characters and explain their various aspects and what they represent. Bart gets a whole chapter of his own, but somewhat amusingly, this chapter consists mostly of the author's memories of being in college in the early nineties. Then again, The Simpsons is so ubiquitous that it doesn't just reflect the society but deeply affects it, which creates a wild and totally postmodern feedback loop. But now I am hungry and my attention span is diminishing, so I shall perhaps let this review at Slashdot that I found tell you the rest. But the book is really good, read it if you can and are of the type that laughs at all the Simpsons references at Fark and stuff.
A few years ago there was a network show about the same overall theme, "Line of Fire", which I thought was really good but unfortunately got canceled early. (Ever since that show, I have used the line "and that's that about that" in many occasions, just like the head mobster.) Contrary to my expectations, The Brotherhood is not about the Westies, but instead it depicts the wacky and violent antics of the Irish organized crime in the grimy Rhode Island, apparently far from the leafy suburbs where the Griffin family lives. And let's just say that the show has obviously been "inspired" by The Sopranos in more than just a few ways. Of course there are also differences in that, for example, instead of going to Bada Bing, the tough Irish mobsters congregate in a remote Irish bar near a highway. The most important difference is that of the two brothers who are the main characters of the story, one is a politician (a state congressman, in fact) while the other is a renegade hardcase mobster and enforcer who has returned from a seven year absense on the lam.
I don't know if I am going out on a limb here and I might be totally mistaken in this, but I think that one important theme of this show is that in many ways, backroom politics and organized crime are very similar and require similar skills and attitudes. To support this theory, I offer the scene that was near the end of the second episode. The two brothers stood together in a room, and the mobster brother said to the politician brother that you know, perhaps they are not that different after all, to which the politician angrily responded that he is nothing like him. I guess I'll have to keep watching the show to see if my "hunch" is correct!
Sometimes I wish I was more media literate so that I would understand these things better. For example, last night we watched the movie "Proof", which is about the nerdy daughter (quite well played by Gwyneth Paltrow) of the recently deceased famous mathematician (Anthony Hopkins, in the exact same role that he plays in every non-Hannibal movie) who had been mentally ill for the last five years. Man, all those top mathematicians and their beautiful minds hunting for proofs, they just can't be like normal people. The countless notebooks left behind by the late mathematician are just nonsense, but one of them turns out to contain a brilliant proof for an unspecified but important mathematical conjecture about prime numbers.
After putting all the dramatic pieces in place, the plot twist is that the daughter claims that she wrote this proof, not her dad, who could only produce schizophrenic gibberish. But how to, you know, prove this? And do we even care? A female mathematician... what's next, a talking banana? In the end when everything has turned out fine, and the daughter and the math graduate student (Jake Gyllenhaal) start stepping through the proof together, my wife turned to me and asked "Is she talking about the proof... or her life?" Hot damn, woman, you are freaking me out even worse than when you casually noted that "Neo" is anagram for "one".
To improve my media literacy skills, I read "Planet Simpson" by Chris Turner. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that this book is not a collection of episode recaps written by some fanboy who thinks he is really funny and watching Simpsons makes him edgy and cool and all "anti-authoritarian", but the book actually contained genuinely interesting ideas and observations and I learned quite a lot of stuff in it.
The overall style is somewhat reminiscent of Douglas Coupland, who provided the foreword for the book. The book is mainly organized to go through the characters and explain their various aspects and what they represent. Bart gets a whole chapter of his own, but somewhat amusingly, this chapter consists mostly of the author's memories of being in college in the early nineties. Then again, The Simpsons is so ubiquitous that it doesn't just reflect the society but deeply affects it, which creates a wild and totally postmodern feedback loop. But now I am hungry and my attention span is diminishing, so I shall perhaps let this review at Slashdot that I found tell you the rest. But the book is really good, read it if you can and are of the type that laughs at all the Simpsons references at Fark and stuff.
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