Why "Breaking Bad" Sucks

While I'm aware that the subject of this post is not a movie, it has nonetheless obsessed many of my movie loving friends and stuck it's mangy head into many an otherwise interesting movie-related conversation, making it fair game. Also, spoilers ahead. You have been warned.

Yesterday I had the latest in a series of... let's call them "discussions" with another of my friends who thinks "Breaking Bad" was something pretty special. While everyone is entitled to their opinion, in this case his opinion, like the opinion of many other friends on this subject, couldn't be more wrong: Breaking Bad sucks.

When pressed to provide reasons why Breaking Bad was the greatest thing since sliced bread my buddy, like everyone else I've ever met who liked the show, couldn't get much past "Bryan Cranston is awesome." This tells me that what we had with Breaking Bad was a really popular show that people thought was great because it was really popular because people thought it was great because it was really popular... you get the picture. I was really hoping that when the final season made its way into the cultural dumpster so would any memory of this abomination, yet the thing persists; like pee stains on white pants, to taunt me.

But back to last night's conversation that spawned this diatribe.

That conversation was progressing with the usual "Bryan Cranston is awesome" silliness when my buddy crossed a line and, with a completely straight face, compared Breaking Bad to "The Sopranos". It was at that point I resolved to dedicate a post to the Kim Kardashian of "serious programming"; Breaking Bad.

So let's get something out of the way right off the bat: comparing "The Sopranos" to "Breaking Bad" is like comparing the Rolling Stones' "Sway" to the Rolling Stones' "She's So Cold". One is art, the other is a consumer product.

That said here are just some of the many, many reasons Breaking Bad sucks (numbered for your convenience).

1) Bryan Cranston can't act his way out of a paper bag. He has two expessions; mouth agape and squinty eyes.

2) His character's story arch is laughably bad. Sure guys go through crises when facing the void, but even the void wouldn't turn Mr Rogers into Attila the Hun. Mr Rogers might go get himself a Miata, but he's not changing from a wall flower into a guy who tells psycho cartel leaders where to stuff it.

3) They do the "Gee we lost all our money again" thing about 12 times too many. They go back to that well more than Peter Jackson dips into the dead/not dead well.

4) The wife is loathsome. The character is abysmally written. As inconsistent a characterization as I've ever seen. One season a yuppie new age air head, next season a hard-boiled prison wife, next season scared, so scared. So, so scared.

4) The brother in law in the DEA is stupid beyond words. Imagine if they made Carmela's brother head of the Jersey FBI organized crime division. Just lazy, stupid writing.

5) The trope that he's dying of cancer is the most naked attempt I've ever seen of a writer trying to tug at heart strings to try and justify a character's assholedness; and make no mistake, WW is an a-hole of historic proportions.

6) He's such an indescribable a-hole I kept hoping someone would kill him. I don't think I'm supposed to be hoping that.

7) The idea that WW could kill a cartel leader and still be walking a week later is stupid.

8) The notion you could use an RV as a meth lab is stupid.

9) The idea you could cook in houses waiting to be fumigated was funny for about 5 minutes. Then I realized how stupid it was.

10) ABQ is about as compelling as minute rice.

11) Aaron Paul is an even worse actor than Bryan Cranston, and that's saying something. It's no accident he hasn't been seen since the show ended. Also, his character may be the most meaningless and poorly written in a show packed with meaningless, poorly written characters.

We can't act.

12) Flash round
I knew the RV wouldn't start.
I knew the kid on the bike would kill the fat drug dealer.
I knew the kid on the motorcycle would get killed.
I knew WW's cancer would go into remission.
I knew it would come back.
I knew the brother in law would find out.
I knew the cartel guy was going to die at the pool party.
I knew the chicken guy was going to kill the cook guy in the lab.
I knew Skyler was going to walk into the pool.
I knew the girlfriend was going to stiff the kid in front of her dad.
I knew she was going to eventually OD.
I knew Jessie was coming back, every damn time he came back.
I knew the old guy who couldn't talk had a bomb in his wheelchair.
I knew Jessie would discover the secret of the cigarette.

Whew! But wait. I'm not done.

13) The comedic moments say more about the writer's ineptitude than their ability to know when to throttle back.

14) Jerry Seinfeld had Bryan Cranston pegged pretty well: a second rate character guy, good for a few minutes of light diversion here and there.

15) The entire series seems like a Lifetime tv take on what it must be like to be a meth dealer. Like Lifetime went into high schools looking for writing talent to bring their 'bold' idea to the small screen and harnessed the best 10th grade writers in ABQ.

16) And for the record; the brother-in-law as he exists in the show does not get the job as head of the ABQ office. Ever. He also doesn't change from being class clown to being large and in charge. People are what they are. Often within a range, sure. But they are what they are. Good writers understand this.

17) The disabled son serves no purpose other than as a ham-handed device intended to show us WW may be hurting innocent people. They could completely ditch the kid character and instead show some of the thousands of lives WW is laying waste in his quest to get his wife Starbucks money for life.

18) The meltdown of Jessie toward the end is some of the worst acting I have ever seen. Laughably bad from beginning to end. He just took the same high-school-drama-club-quality "I'm mad" look that he's had in every scene since the first show and ramped it up a few degrees until he looked like he was taking a shit in his pants while setting the house on fire.

I could go on but what would be the point. Good riddance BB. You sucked.

Chris

Support Independent Film

My friend Rich Chambers has a short film that's begun making the festival rounds called "Tristan and Isolde" (poster below). It's a 7 minute horror flick with no dialogue. Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde" is used as backdrop music and the film deals loosely with Wagner's idea of "love death" and how a serial killer might think that was a pretty good idea. So, to say it's darkly comedic would be putting it mildly.

Rich has given me the link and password to the film on vimeo to share only with viewers of 21st Century Films. So enjoy and don't forget to support independent filmmakers.

https://vimeo.com/129768872
password: 983olsef

For the record, Rich has another short that's in production and should be done by the end of the year. It's a much more involved production that I'm helping him out with and it's looking amazing at this point.

Mad Max Fury Road - 2015 - Movie Review

Mad Max: Fury Road is the best action movie since Casino Royale and the best movie, period, that I've seen in maybe 5 years. Beautifully rendered, thrilling, compelling, touching, heartbreaking, groundbreaking and more it turns the table on movieland's (can you really call it "Hollywood" any more?) subjugation of women, delves into the origins of religion and breaths new life into the much abused notion of the post-apocalypse.

The oil wars that led to the nuclear holocaust have morphed into the oil/water wars of a future time that's not quite clear. I'm down with that since dating future events too specifically has always, for me, diminished otherwise great movies (I'm thinking Cameron's original "Terminator" and Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner"). Max Rockatansky is back to his old wandering-the-wasteland ways and as the film opens he's standing astride a bluff overlooking said wasteland narrating his post-apocalypse credentials. After a moment a mutant lizard has the misfortune of wandering beneath his bootleather and becomes a tasty wasteland treat for our anti-hero.

With that the stage is set.

Max bundles himself into his Interceptor and blasts off into the heat waves not a moment too soon as non-specific wasteland types pursue. Well, actually he should have left a few moments earlier because in short order he's caught and brought to the Citadel where it's determined his blood type makes him a 'universal donor' to be exploited in order to keep the Citadel's troops (called "War Boys") running smooth.

And just what is the Citadel? It's a rocky outcropping in the middle of nowhere that's become the refuge of choice for the downtrodden since its also the only source of water for several hundred clicks in any direction. The Citadel's grand high exalted mystic ruler, one Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne: "toecutter" from Mad Max 1) has a stranglehold on access to deep underground wells and uses it to impose his cultish control. He's a world class dick with psoriasis to beat the band who has a stable of portly lactators constantly hooked up to mechanical milkers and a second gaggle of lovelies he calls "breeders" that he keeps captive to bear his offspring.

His looting and pillaging is done by "Imperators" but one, Imperator Furiosa, has decided she's had enough of ol' scaleback and heads off for parts unknown with Joe's breeders when she's supposed to be out securing gas and guns. The rest of the film is her and the breeders trying to stay one step ahead of Joe's henchmen on the fury road. Along the way Max escapes captivity and joins her in her quest for the always elusive "green place".

The film has an expansive look that deliberately harkens back to Lawrence of Arabia. Certainly others have tried in the past 50 years to capture that visual magic but Fury Road may be the first to actually do it. The chase sequences are thrilling and Miller shows once again that he knows just when to step on the gas and when to lay off the pedal and let the audience breath (are you paying attention Mr Bay?). Tom Hardy has all of Mel Gibson's detached authority but none of his swagger and for the purposes of this film that seems entirely appropriate since Max has probably been wandering the wasteland for many years now and had the swagger bleached out of him. This Max is also something of a mute with Hardy barely speaking but for one short scene that precedes the final act.

As for the rest of the cast: Charleze Theron finally redeems herself after her atrocious Snow White performance of a couple of years back. Her Furiosa seems truly dangerous because she doesn't really know  where she's going, only that she's not letting anyone get in her way. Nicholas Hoult as the War Boy turned ally gives a textured, intense and touching performance that in many ways represents the emotional center of the narrative. He just wants his life to mean something. Anything. And is willing to do whatever it takes to achieve that meaning.

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley is saddled with the fakest looking pregnancy ever but manages to transcend bad makeup effects and hit the right notes. Zoe "High Beams" Kravitz is actually something of a revelation while Riley Keough represents the film's only real casting disaster. She spends the entire movie with a look on her face that says; "I'm Elvis' f***ing granddaughter! Don't you twerps get it!?"

Much has been made of the proposition that Fury Road is actually a feminist manifesto of sorts and you know what? It is. That fact doesn't in any way diminish this as a Mad Max movie though and personally I think presenting Max as a kind of ghostly presence in his own film is rather in keeping with the mythology. But back to the ladies.

This isn't Charlie's Angels style, tough-consumer-chick cliche bs with lots of wire-work and bullet time. The women in this wasteland sweat and bleed and hope and despair and aren't taking shit from anyone. You want to mess with Furiosa she's going to cram her fake arm up your ass and rip out your liver. Not for the fun of it, but so that you'll remember not to f*ck with her again. Aside from that she's charming. The older women in the film are also nobody's fools. They've been on their own for decades guarding their tiny desert outpost and are tough as their leathery skin. They have heart and brains, guts and determination and, crucially, they also hold fast to the hope that something worthwhile may someday spring forth from our lost species.

Watching them brought to mind an episode from my teenage years. I was beset for a time by a gang of local thugs who were intent on proving that individually they had no balls but collectively they could take on any lone neighborhood kid. One afternoon they invaded my back yard carrying chains and pipes and were going to show me a thing or two. Suddenly my mother - in her early 50s at the time (yes she had me relatively late) - exploded out the back door and met them square-on in the driveway. I stood there stunned as she shoved their tough talk back in their faces and ejected them from her property by sheer force of will. Once they left she looked at me, smiled and went back inside to finish dinner. That day I learned something about women I've never forgotten. I'm guessing George Miller has seen it too.

Mad Max: Fury Road. A decade in the making and worth the wait. Available on Blu-Ray Sept 1.

Verdict: ★★★★★

I'm Back

For the better part of 2 years I've been helping my friend Rich Chambers with his various film projects. It's been a wild, entertaining, educational ride that continues today. Two of his films "The Shadow Sea" and "Tristan and Isolde" are in the can and being shopped around while a third, as yet untitled short film is currently in production and may be his best yet.

The challenge for me has been to find a way to balance film making with film blogging. So I've decided to revive 21st Century Films primarily as a movie review blog; although other things may also work their way onto the blog as time allows. This approach will let me to continue to help Rich - who has a huge backlog of stories and inexhaustible creative energy - while also reviving this blog which I have missed so much. So without further ado let's get this party (re)started.

Chris

The top 10 movies for the weekend of November 15 - November 17, 2013

1) Thor: The Dark World	$36.5 Million
2) The Best Man Holiday	$30.1 Million
3) Last Vegas	$8.4 Million
4) Free Birds	$8.1 Million
5) Bad Grandpa	$7.4 Million
6) Gravity	$6.1 Million
7) Ender's Game	$6 Million
8) 12 Years a Slave	$4.6 Million
9) Captain Phillips	$4.3 Million
10) About Time	$3.3 Million

The number one movie a year ago this week was Lionsgate's "Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2" which opened in the top spot with $141 million in box office receipts.

(Green indicates new release)

"Sin City 2" gets a name change

Poster with dumbed-down title for SC2

"Sin City: A Dame to Kill For" has been retitled "Sin City: A Dame to Die For" in an apparent attempt to make sure none of those uber-sensitive consumer types get their knickers in a twist and find themselves offended. Oh well. It'll always be "A Dame to Kill For" to me.

"Noah" - trailer

I don't know what's stranger: that they'd make a movie about Noah in 2013 or that a film about Noah would be directed by Darren Aronofsky. It makes a certain amount of sense I guess when you consider Hollywood's penchant for end-of-the-world storylines. I can imagine being in meeting: "Think 2012, but retro!"


"Noah" hits theaters March 28, 2014.

The top 10 movies for the weekend of November 8 - November 10, 2013

1) Thor: The Dark World	$85.7 Million
2) Bad Grandpa	$11.3 Million
3) Free Birds	$11.1 Million
4) Last Vegas	$11 Million
5) Ender's Game	$10.2 Million
6) Gravity	$8.5 Million
7) 12 Years a Slave	$6.6 Million
8) Captain Phillips	$5.7 Million
9) About Time	$4.7 Million
10) Cloudy w/a chance of Meatballs 2	$2.7 Million

The number one movie a year ago this week was Sony's "Skyfall" which opened at the top with $88.3 million in box office receipts.

(Green indicates new release)

Justin Lin takes director's chair for Bourne 5

New "Bourne" director Justin Lin

Though rumors have teased the return of Matt Damon to the franchise for a couple of years now it seems pretty clear that the Bourne universe he essentially created is moving on without him. He has stated on multiple occasions that he would not return to the character of Jason Bourne unless director Paul Greengrass was brought back with him.

Well, Universal has pretty effectively hammered the final nail in the coffin of Damon/Greengrass with their announcement that "Fast and Furious" director Justin Lin will take the big chair for the series' next installment. It's hoped that Lin - who turned the lame F&F concept into box office gold - will do the same with the Bourne franchise, which frankly is difficult to justify without an actual Bourne character in it.

"Mad Max Fury Road" the film that wouldn't be born

The delays on George Miller's fourth Mad Max film had already become the stuff of developmental legend. But a few months ago it seemed that maybe, finally, the film was in the can. Apparently, that's not quite the case after all.

Said star Tom Hardy at the BFI London Film Festival: “[Mad Max] is great, it’s a big old beast, it’s a behemoth. I’m off out there next week to do some reshoots – well, not reshoots, actually, we’re doing more. Building more Mad Max that’s even more spectacular.”

Hardy's words are the kind that those of us who've been waiting on this film for several years now really didn't want to hear and raises the question: is he simply putting a brave face on a disaster or did the studio decide that what Miller had done to this point was so good it warranted an additional investment to put it over the top? I guess we'll know when we finally see the flick.

If we finally see the flick.

Possibly coming some day to a theater near you. Maybe.