My Cousin Vinny Turns 30 (and I try not to freak out). I don’t know what it is these days – maybe the existential dread of going into year 3 of the COVID-19 pandemic, not to mention the horrendous situation in Ukraine – but my boyfriend and I have been intentionally seeking out TV shows and movies that are about good people who are kind to each other where no one shouts, manipulates, betrays, or murders anyone. Preferably with a happy ending. Admittedly this leaves out a lot of prestige TV and a lot of really great movies, but man, are we wrung out right now. We binged our way through Ted Lasso and All Creatures Great and Small and our hearts grew ten sizes as a result, and we have since been desperately seeking more media in this same vein. CODA , one of this year’s Academy Award nominees for Best Picture, was a breath of fresh air. The Lost Daughter , on the other hand, left us depressed and almost angry, despite the critical acclaim and our general love for all things Olivia Coleman. We welcomed Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story , as his storytelling skills and ethnically-accurate casting, along with Tony Kushner’s screenplay, canceled out nearly every cringey element of the original, but again - lots of murder, lots of idiot plot (it is an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet , Shakespeare’s famous play ostensibly about star-crossed lovers that is actually about how fucking dumb teenagers are when they fall in lust #sorrynotsorry), it’s depressing and frustrating. We noped out on Succession even though basically everyone is telling us to watch it. We did enjoy Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth , but come on – it’s Shakespeare (but about ambitious and paranoid royalty and the fate of Scotland, not two dumb hormonal kids!), and we are former theater majors (albeit very briefly on both our parts). We knew going into it that there’s a lot of murder and betrayal. Plus, Denzel. Plus, Frances. Plus, the beauty of the language. It’s Shakespeare! Shakespeare about grown-ups! Come on! All that being said, when I decided to write about the 30th anniversary of My Cousin Vinny , I was a little apprehensive, first of all, as many regular readers might know because when I write these anniversary pieces, I tend to get really bogged down in my own neuroses about aging. And second of all, I hadn’t seen the film in a long time, and all I remembered was a lot of yelling by Vinny (played by Joe Pesci) and his girlfriend Lisa (played by Marisa Tomei). Also: a violent murder is a big part of the plotline. Imagine my surprise when I rewatched this film and remembered how hysterically funny it is and realized how, in the end, My Cousin Vinny actually is exactly the type of movie that we have been craving in our house: good people who are kind to each other. Who love each other. Who do the right thing? People who come together in understanding. A happy ending. When My Cousin Vinny was released in 1992, Joe Pesci had already proven his comedic chops after his appearance as Harry, one of the burglars in my all-time favorite Christmas movie, Home Alone – pretty impressive considering Home Alone was released the same year as Martin Scorsese’s extremely violent and extremely famous mob movie Goodfellas . Tommy DeVito, a legit psychopath (even by mafia standards) is perhaps the most quintessential Pesci role – the one he will likely always be the most strongly associated with. (Go to YouTube and search, “Do I amuse you?” – I guarantee you know this scene even if you haven’t seen Goodfellas .) I’ve always gotten the feeling that Pesci did Home Alone and My Cousin Vinny in an attempt to avoid being pigeonholed into mafia stories, though in both films he does tap into a stereotypical New Yawker Italian gangster-like sensibility. (Hard to escape for an actor of Italian descent who grew up in Jersey, I suppose...) In brief: Bill Gambini (Ralph Macchio, the OG Karate Kid) and Stan Rothstein (Mitchell Whitfield), two kids from New York, are road-tripping to Los Angeles where they have just won scholarships to study at UCLA. While driving through Alabama, they accidentally shoplift a can of tuna at a convenience store. After they leave, the store is robbed by two other young men and the store manager is killed. The police arrest Bill and Stan because they fit the description of the suspects, but the poor kids are so freaked out by their accidental shoplifting that their guilty behavior and confessions of shoplifting results in them being charged with murder, as the confession is misconstrued as a confession to the larger crime. Enter the titular Cousin Vinny: Vincent Gambini, a personal injury lawyer from Brooklyn who has only just managed to pass the bar (after five previous failed attempts) and has no trial experience. But he agrees to take the case because Bill is family, and… well, wacky hijinks ensue. I realize how flippant that sounds in the context of a trial against two young boys who have been falsely accused of murder; however, what follows is a really fun, classic fish-out-of-water story, where Vinny and Lisa (Tomei), who has accompanied him to Alabama, have to get used to the food, climate, and culture of the deep south within a small rural town whose citizens definitely do not trust New Yorkers (especially not New Yorkers who look like Tommy DeVito from Goodfellas , presumably). Somehow, they must keep his little cousin and his friend from getting the death penalty for a crime they did not commit. Vinny, though extremely nervous to be a litigator, manages to convince the trial judge that he is experienced enough to represent Bill and Stan, though his ignorance of courtroom procedures, appropriate dress code, and abrasive New Yawker attitude consistently land him in contempt of court. Despite the lack of a murder weapon, the prosecutor appears to have a strong case, with the actual culprits long-fled from town, and Bill and Stan’s accidental confession essentially guarantees a guilty verdict. That being said, as the trial continues, Vinny starts to come into his own as an astute attorney, who learns quickly how best to cross-examine witnesses, integrates his growing knowledge of southern culture (for instance, how long it takes to cook grits) to poke holes in eyewitness testimony, and gradually earns the begrudging respect of the judge. What I loved as I was rewatching the film was how even though a lot of the humor of the film comes from the fish-out-of-water aspects of Vinny’s experiences in court (for instance, it takes several back-and-forths for the judge to understand his New Yawk pronunciation of the word “youths,”) and in this small Alabama town (grits for breakfast, getting his car stuck in intractable mud, the oppressive heat, everyone being suspicious of his leather jacket), it does so in a gentle way. This isn’t a film that is just centered around mocking small-town southerners – Vinny and Lisa’s New Yawk-ness is also made fun of considerably. Nobody here is ultimately the butt of the joke – or perhaps everyone is, but with great affection. The folks in the town come to care for and appreciate Vinny and Lisa by the end of the film, even if they don’t particularly understand them, and vice versa. And justice is ultimately served, via a triumphant turn on the witness stand by Lisa, who Vinny calls as an expert witness due to being born into a family of mechanics – her vast knowledge of cars ends up being the key to what exonerates Bill and Stan. (Tomei won an Academy Award for her performance in this film, which I recall at the time was quite controversial as broad comedies like this one rarely get such acknowledgment at the Oscars, but if you watch the entire courtroom sequence featuring Lisa’s testimony, the way she slowly realizes where Vinny’s line of questioning is going and begins to really get into the performance of her testifying, and the way she plays off of Pesci with such brassy and brash confidence, I defy you to object to her win. This is a beautiful and brilliantly charming performance, and her chemistry with Pesci is spellbinding.) Lisa’s testimony leads the police to open up another search for the real killers, who are quickly found in Georgia. The judge drops the charges, the boys are released and on their way to their UCLA scholarships, Vinny proves that he actually is a good attorney, and he and Lisa drive off back to Brooklyn… bickering about their wedding plans, but obviously very much in love. I don’t have a whole lot more to say about this film, honestly – unless you want me to start expounding on how I was seven years old when this film was released, and now I’m 37, and clearly, mortality is freaking me out (you can get plenty of that from my earlier Story Screen anniversary pieces) – except that, in addition to Tomei as Lisa, it’s basically chock full of charming performances (shout-out to Fred Gwynne, most famously known as Herman Munster, as Judge Chamberlain Haller), it’s one of Pesci’s greatest film roles, and to be frank? If you’re like Tim and me right now, burned out from the non-stop despair around us, and just want some gentle fun, some big belly laughs, some good-hearted characters who want to do the right thing and succeed? It’s worth revisiting. Do it. We need more Vincent Gambinis in the world, especially now. Spend some time with him and you’ll feel better about life. At least for a while. Reeya Banerjee Reeya is a Hudson Valley-based musician and writer. In her other life, she works as a hospitality finance associate, enjoys watching Law & Order SVU reruns while eating gummy bears, and has a film degree from Vassar College that she does not use. She can frequently be found in various coffee shops and bars drinking IPAs while reading pop culture news on her phone.

It seems Spring 2022 was the season of grifters on prestige television. Prior to the pandemic, I was quite addicted to podcasts and shows about true crime, but after two years of COVID anxiety, as I mentioned in my last piece for Story Screen, I have been craving gentler fare in my entertainment. That being said, the fascinating thing about the four grifter shows I am about to talk about ( Inventing Anna, SuperPumped, The Dropout, and WeCrashed ) is how they capture the tension, excitement, and yes, passive voyeurism of the true-crime genre without getting into gristly details about stalking, murder, blood, and dead victims. Interestingly, the four shows that landed this spring about grifters were all sourced from material originally generated from actual journalistic reportage in print media, publishing, and podcasts - and I had consumed all of the source material before these shows began to air. It's a curious thing to go into a show based on real events knowing exactly how everything ends, but it forced me to think about the art of adaptation, how best to portray in action the written word or disembodied podcast voices, and issues of dramatic license. I also have personal connections in varying degrees about the protagonists of each of the shows I am about to analyze for you - the first one being that each protagonist, save for Anna Delvey, is around my age: the Old Millenial cohort. (What I do have in common with Young Millenial Delvey – and YES, the younger cohort is a bit different from us oldheads – is that I used to work in an office building in Manhattan around the corner from the building she wanted to acquire for her start-up foundation; basically, I know the neighborhood she wanted to be associated with very well, and I very much understand why she wanted to be there.) The second one is, that both The Dropout and SuperPumped are shows about Silicon Valley startups. Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford to start her company Theranos in Silicon Valley - a mere two hours away from where I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Travis Kalanick chose to set up his headquarters for Uber in San Francisco itself. And finally, we have WeCrashed , the story of Adam Neumann and the downfall of WeWork, and the show where I have the most personal connection of all - because, for a very brief while, I worked at WeWork HQ in Manhattan. I was introduced to Adam Neumann when I was hired. I had a really lengthy conversation with WeWork co-founder Miguel McKelvey during my first week there. It was a jolt to "see" these men again (as portrayed by actors), to see how closely the set looked like my former office, and to be reminded that I was lucky to get out of that company before things really went off the rails. Enough setup. Let me take you through each show, in chronological order of its first air date: Inventing Anna (available to stream on Netflix) tells the story of Anna Delvey (nee Sorokin) - a young woman of mysterious origin who arrives in New York, creates a fictional backstory of being the heiress to a wealthy German family, and essentially cons a number of friends and financial business partners in order to start the Anna Delvey Foundation. The Foundation, honestly, is a half-baked idea that seems like a combination spa/lounge/private club/art gallery without a clear focus, and she is obsessed with obtaining business loans to buy 281 Park Avenue South - a gorgeous building in the Flatiron neighborhood of Manhattan. She gets pretty damn far, too, by falsifying financial documents, cashing bad checks, and mooching off of her high society friends. She had no fixed residence, moving from hotel to hotel (being thrown out and blacklisted by each as they discover she has no way to pay her room fees or any services charged to her room). Eventually, after grifting multiple financial institutions, hotels, and friends to the tune of $275,000, she is caught and held in Rikers pending her trial. Inventing Anna tells this story via journalist Vivan Kent (Anna Chlumsky) from Manhattan Magazine (a thinly veiled version of New York magazine, where journalist Jessica Pressler wrote an article entitled "How Anna Delvey Tricked New York's Party People" which served as most of the source material for this show), interviewing Anna and her friends, former friends, and former associates to presumably write the show’s version of Pressler’s article. Delvey is played by Julia Garner, who nails Delvey's bizarre mishmash Russian-attempting-to-be-German accent and brash, over-confident attitude with great aplomb - she is a far cry from her central Missouri hillbilly character Ruth Langmore in Ozark - and you get the feeling that she really enjoyed herself while doing this role. The miniseries is produced by Shonda Rhimes, and many actors known from the "Shondaverse" can be seen in key roles, like Katie Lowes, Jeff Perry, Kate Burton, and Josh Malina. It also features a great turn by Laverne Cox as Delvey's personal trainer/nurturing friend (who, inevitably, Delvey also screws over). This show is pretty enjoyable but it goes absolutely bonkers in the last two episodes, when, after Vivian has turned in her article and received much acclaim for her work once the magazine hits the stands, she gets overly invested in Delvey's fate at her trial, despairs when Delvey is convicted, and the two share a tearful goodbye in the Riker's Island visiting room before she is bussed up to Bedford Hills Correctional Facility to serve her sentence. This ending is utterly bizarre, and according to Pressler, bears absolutely no resemblance to what actually happened when Delvey was sentenced or the nature of her relationship with Delvey. I understand the need for dramatic license when telling a story based on real-life events, but I see absolutely no reason why the show had the journalist who set out to uncover Delvey's many deceptions essentially also fall for the same charms and personality quirks and charisma that allowed her to scam so many people. Narratively, it makes no sense whatsoever, and it left me with a bad taste in my mouth. Subsequently, I learned that one of Delvey's real-life friends - a friend who was also a character on the show and seems to be the only friend from Delvey's circle who has stayed loyal to her - served as a consultant to the Shondaland producing team as the show was developed. This also left a bad taste in my mouth, as I don't see how a Delvey loyalist as a consultant could have helped tell this story with any measure of objectivity, and so it's perhaps not surprising that in the end, this show tries to make us feel sympathy for Delvey (all of those TEARS between Chlumsky and Garner in the Riker's set, my god!) even though by all accounts, first and foremost Pressler's New York feature that was the backbone of the show's structure, Delvey was a narcissist and probably a sociopath too. Obviously, narrative television is not documentary, but I'm sorry, I do not feel bad for Anna (Delvey) Sorokin one little bit, and I think it does a disservice to Pressler to have Vivian, the character based on her, display such a weird lack of necessary distance and journalistic ethics to be weeping with real sadness and remorse as the subject of her article is being taken to prison. It's weird. It's really, really weird. Just so you know, Anna Delvey was sentenced to 2-12 years, was released after 2, and then was detained by ICE for overstaying her visa. This seems like an unfair Catch-22 – she was in prison when her visa ran out – but yeah no, I still have no sympathy for this woman at all. You reap what you sow, girl. Inventing Anna stats Grifter Scale: 10 Bizarre Fake Accent Scale: 10 Journalistic Ethics Scale: 3 Faithfulness to Source Material: 4 Should You Watch It: Eh, probably not unless you are a Julia Garner fan. This show is weird. Let's move on to a different kind of weirdness - Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the biotech company Theranos, recently convicted for one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud against her investors and four counts of actual wire fraud against said investors, and the eponymous dropout of The Dropout , Hulu's recent miniseries based on the ABC News podcast of the same name. Holmes... is a weird person. Very, very weird. And I find this weirdness - and the story of Theranos that accompanies it - indelibly fascinating. For some backstory: Holmes came up with an idea for a blood-testing device that could test for many, many health conditions using only one drop of blood (instead of the multiple vials that a traditional arm-draw needs), dropped out of Stanford, convinced her parents to invest her college fund into her startup company (soon to be known as Theranos) to develop this device – and then somehow, even though the idea was fundamentally flawed, would have needed nearly a decade to develop properly, and probably would never have worked, she believed so strongly in her vision (or was really, really good at lying - we may never know) that she managed to convince a number of prominent people to invest in her company or serve on her board (or both): Larry Ellison. The Walton family. The DeVos family (yes, that DeVos). Rupert Murdoch. Henry fucking Kissinger. And of course, to his own downfall, the late George Schultz, former Secretary of Treasury and Secretary of Labor to Richard Nixon and former Secretary of State to Ronald Reagan. She brokered deals with Walgreens and Safeway to put Theranos testing machines in in-store Wellness Centers well before the technology was ready. She and Theranos COO Sunny Balwani (also her boyfriend at the time) lied to everyone, including their own employees, about the efficacy of their technology, all while running diluted one-drop blood tests in Siemans testing machines hidden in an entirely separate lab from where the research was being done. She convinced these investors and partners to come on board through a combination of bald-faced deception (she Photoshopped the Pfizer logo atop reports on Theranos technology's capabilities WRITTEN BY THERANOS and presented them as proof that they had approval from the pharmaceutical industry) and capitalizing on her very bizarre brand of charisma: she was a young, blonde woman, hair in a slightly disheveled bun, red lipstick, dressed in head-to-toe black, compulsively drinking green juice... speaking in a very low, almost baritone voice. Honestly, when she spoke, she sounded like she was trying to impersonate a lumberjack. Sources who knew her when she was still at Stanford and when she was younger say that it is not her natural speaking voice - it seems she thought a lower voice lent her a sense of gravitas that was necessary when talking to all of these old white rich men to get them to give her money. Maybe it did. Or maybe they all just felt great supporting a young cute blonde kicking down barriers in a STEM field. Maybe a little of both. Probably a little of both. Look, I am incredibly fascinated by Holmes because she is SO DAMN WEIRD. She's a year older than me and she somehow swayed all of these not-unintelligent investors and business partners (not to mention the numerous Stanford professors and researchers who served on her board and helped with product development) to believe in her completely implausible idea just by speaking confidently in a lumberjack voice and having blonde hair? She wants to be the next Steve Jobs (hence the wardrobe), but with blood testing instead of computers? She loves green juice?! SHE SPEAKS LIKE A GODDAMN LUMBERJACK, AND THE VOICE IS FAKE??!! I listened to both seasons of The Dropout podcast. I listened to Bad Blood: The Final Chapter, a podcast by Wall Street Journal writer John Carreyrou (who eventually wrote the expose that revealed Theranos’ fraud, which ultimately turned into a book, which I have also read). I know a lot about this woman. Maybe too much, because when I enthusiastically cajoled my boyfriend into watching the Hulu miniseries with me, he (not knowing ANYTHING about Holmes - despite her having been convicted in her trial late last year) mistook my fascination with Holmes to be a desire to BE LIKE HOLMES. That’s right: my boyfriend, who has known me for over a decade, thought I wanted to be Elizabeth Holmes. I was quite mad. He was disabused of this notion very quickly and sharply. But yeah, I admit, I was very hyped to watch The Dropout . This was a situation where I knew literally every single plot point before it happened, from her decision to leave Stanford to Theranos Lab Director Ian Gibbons committing suicide when he realized that the machines were being used on real patients even though they were nowhere near ready, to George Shultz's grandson Tyler, a Theranos employee, and his colleague Erica Cheung, serving as whistleblowers and sources for the Carreyrou article that began Theranos' downfall (causing George Shultz to essentially disown Tyler out of a bizarre sense of loyalty to Holmes; grandfather and grandson managed to reconcile shortly before the elder Shultz's death last year), to Holmes and Balwani's falling out in the aftermath of the article, to Holmes' eventual fate after being put on trial. And so what I can say is that the TV series is very, very faithful to the podcast that serves as its source material (as well as Carreyrou's), far more so than Inventing Anna was faithful to Pressler's New York article. It is exceptionally cast - Amanda Seyfried's performance as Holmes is absolutely incredible - if she doesn't win an Emmy, I'll drink a glass of green juice. Naveen Andrews is wonderful as the prickly, volatile Balwani. Stephen Fry is heartbreaking as Gibbons, and in a different way, so is Sam Waterston as George Shultz. Dylan Minnette and Camryn Mi-young Kim are great as Tyler and Erica. And also, some great appearances by Bill Irwin, Laurie Metcalf, William H. Macy, Alan Ruck, Josh Pais, Kate Burton, Rich Sommer, Michaela Watkins, LisaGay Hamilton, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, and Elizabeth Marvel - seriously, sometimes while watching this I'd turn to Tim and say "Holy crap, EVERYONE is on this show!" - as other pivotal characters in the Theranos story. The Dropout is very, very good. It balances the need to adhere to its source material for accuracy's sake without sacrificing some necessary dramatic license to allow for narrative tension and a clear plot arc to structure the story as an effective television show (as opposed to a documentary). It's well written, well-acted, and well-produced. And Seyfried walks a delicate line in portraying the real mystery of Elizabeth Holmes (and perhaps what is truly fascinating to me, fake lumberjack voice aside): was she intentionally a grifter, like Anna Delvey? Or did she believe so strongly in her product that she lost sight of her ethical responsibility to her investors, her board, and her potential customers? Was she trying so hard to be the next Steve Jobs that she inadvertently neglected her duties as the CEO of her company? Or did she cultivate the female-Jobs person in a calculated manner, knowing that it would make her and her company famous? We don't know. We may never know. All we do know is, at the end of the day, she lied, and those lies got her convicted of fraud. She's going to jail. (At some point; she hasn't been sentenced at the time of this article's publication.) Balwani is currently on trial right now for his role in the Theranos mess, and I'm pretty curious to see how that shakes out too. And Theranos no longer exists. The Dropout stats Grifter Scale: 9. She may not have wanted to believe she was a grifter, but photoshopping Pfizer logos on reports written by the Theranos team and using Siemens machines to run blood tests while pretending to be using Theranos machines is not a good look. Bizarre Voice Scale: 10 (LUMBERJACK, SHE SOUNDS LIKE A LUMBERJACK) Faithfulness to Source Material: 9. Some of the timelines do get compressed, but it doesn't fundamentally change the story. Should You Watch It: Yes. It is very well done. Moving on to SuperPumped - Showtime's take on the story of the founder of Uber, Travis Kalanick, and how Uber came to disrupt the taxi industry. To be perfectly honest, Kalanick (played here in glorious vileness by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) isn't really a grifter. He doesn't fool anyone into anything unless you count fooling his drivers into believing they could make a living wage by being drivers. Kalanick's downfall was how deeply he bought into the most toxic elements of Silicon Valley startup culture. SuperPumped is essentially The Wolf of Wall Street but with ridesharing instead of stocks. We see company parties turn into ragers that destroy hotel rooms, we see female employees being subjected to blatant sexual harassment with no recourse, we see Uber using some dubiously legal technology to skirt issues with taxicab unions, and we see Kyle Chandler (Coach Taylor!) as Bill Gurley, a famous venture capitalist who invests in Uber and becomes increasingly disheartened by Kalanick's behavior and business decisions, we see Kalanick dump his supportive and sensible girlfriend in favor of a younger woman, and we see that younger woman become disgusted with Kalanick's behavior and leave him. Not very grift-y, unless you see Kalanick's attempts to dodge Gurley's tough questions as a kind of grift. Honestly, Kalanick is the only protagonist in the four shows I'm writing about here who seems to be somewhat self-aware when called out on his bad behavior; when video footage is leaked from an Uber driver's dashcam of Kalanick being verbally abusive to said driver, Kalanick immediately knows how much trouble he's in and literally lies down on the floor of an Uber HQ conference room in the fetal position begging to talk to his mother. (Yes, this melodramatic sequence actually did happen in real life.) When he is eventually ousted as the CEO of Uber, he seems to know it is coming and accepts his fate. Kalanick is kinda gross, but he's not delusional the way Anna Delvey or Elizabeth Holmes seems to be. I'll be honest, I don't have as much to say about SuperPumped as I do about these other shows. I've read the book it's based on and it's pretty faithful to the source material. That being said, there are some very showy stylistic choices that the producer's made that feel very self-conscious and honestly make the show kind of difficult to follow. Characters break the fourth wall randomly. Kalanick envisions a fake PowerPoint presentation behind him as he tries to explain to the Apple Store execs why he flouted their policies to keep the app in their store. And the whole story is narrated intermittently by a faceless Quentin Tarantino. Why? It's not necessary. We're already seeing the world through Kalanick's eyes. Forcing Tarantino's very distinctive voice on top of the very heightened world that comprises Uber HQ and takes away from JGL's very strong performance. I really don't get it. Uber obviously still exists. I suggest you use Lyft instead. Or if you’re in Manhattan, just take a damn yellow cab. They’re good, they do their job well, they’re cheaper. What, you’re too good for a cab? Grow up. SuperPumped stats Grifter Scale: 2. Toxic Masculinity Scale: 10+++ Faithfulness to Source Material: 8, but it's hard to tell with the weird stylistic production choices Should You Watch It: Maybe. (I mean, who doesn't love JGL and Coach Taylor?) And now we come to WeCrashed , Apple TV+'s epic tale of the fall of WeWork founder Adam Neumann and the notoriously scuttled WeWork IPO, and a not-particularly welcome trip down memory lane for me, a former WeWork employee who ran for the hills in 2015. To start with: Jared Leto's performance as Neumann gave me chills. I looked at him and I was like, I fucking KNOW that guy. Kyle Marvin, the actor playing WeWork co-founder Miguel McKelvey, also gave me chills. I remember the conversation I had with him when I started working at WeWork, how kind and genuine McKelvey was. He was a really sweet guy. I was able to pinpoint exactly in the narrative when I started working there and when I jumped ship. It didn't take long for me - by which I mean, it took less than three months, and I'm sorry to say (or #sorrynotsorry) that I basically fled the place after being literally locked in the building during a mandatory office Xmas party. They had security standing by the elevators barring people from leaving. I wish I was kidding, I really do. I escaped through the fire exit and set off the alarms as I ran down four flights of stairs and barrelled out onto 18th street towards the 7th Avenue 1 train. I never returned. Was it unprofessional for me to do that? Yes, but that was WeWork in a nutshell. Mandatory "Thank God It's Monday" parties that lasted well into the evening, with IPA flowing freely on tap. Kombucha, baristas, fruit-infused water, and tons of snacks are available during the day. I witnessed the beginning of WeLive, WeWork's doomed attempt at communal living (let's put even less space between our personal and professional lives, woo!) but I left early enough that I didn't get to experience all of the other wackadoo stuff (the "Summer Camp" employee retreats that were a combination of SuperPumped ragers and mandatory cult worship of Neumann as he delivered speeches about how WeWork was going to "change the world's consciousness", the bizarre investments in peripheral companies that had nothing to do with WeWork - such as a startup that creates artificial waves for avid surfers? - and Rebekah Paltrow Neumann's (Adam's wife, and yes, cousin to THAT Paltrow) half-baked school WeGrow, where small children were taken to the Neumann's farm in upstate New York to grow produce and then try to sell it to WeWork employees (to teach entrepreneurship), daily yoga, guest lectures from WeWork employees about business, podcasting, and startups, and motivational speeches from Adam about - what else? - "changing the world's consciousness". Not a whole lot of "reading, writing, or 'rithmatic," and all to the tune of $22-44K a year. Did I mention that Rebekah Neumann has no background in education? I never met her during my brief tenure at WeWork - if I have my timeline right, that was when she was still a yoga instructor and aspiring actor. This might be a good time to remind you that WeWork provides co-working space to freelancers. It's a COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE COMPANY. Someone, please explain to me what the fuck renting desks has to do with changing the world's consciousness? Adam Neumann's fundamental weakness is that he believes so strongly in his own hype, and he is so very charismatic, that he is able to convert his employers into believing in his kind of unclear vision of world domination almost as if he is a cult leader. I remember the culture at HQ. Everyone drank that Kool-Aid. By the gallon. I found it terrifying. We were all also underpaid, while WeWork expanded with locations all over Manhattan, then all over the country, then internationally, and the Neumanns just got richer and richer (I believe in the end they owned five homes) with each new investor and venture capitalist Neumann was able to bring on board. Rebekah began to get more and more involved with the company, to the point of sidelining poor well-intentioned McKelvey, who was in over his head. Again, just like with Elizabeth Holmes (and Anna Delvey), we see how easily rich investors are swayed by entrepreneurs with unsettling charisma even when they are peddling absolute bullshit. WeWork's eventual downfall was the aforementioned scuttled IPO in 2019. According to the show, Adam was initially reluctant to pursue an IPO because he knew it would require full financial disclosure and he knew that the company's debt was growing and its valuation was all smoke and mirrors. (For the record, and contrary to what WeCrashed portrays, I know that WeWork was chasing after the potential of an IPO in 2015 - it may be that Adam was resistant, but when I was interviewing there the hiring manager and recruiters were aware that I had worked at Shake Shack when it went public, and I strongly suspect in retrospect that this was the only reason why I was hired even though I did not play a role in the preparation for Shake Shack to go public.) WeWork publicly filed the IPO paperwork in August 2019. As predicted, they faced much scrutiny of their finances and leadership. Softbank, WeWork's biggest investor, ended up investing far less money than Adam had been led to believe, which led to concerns about profitability. Adam's bizarre antics (including but not limited to smoking weed on a private jet - essentially hotboxing it - serving employees tequila shots after discussing layoffs, the aforementioned artificial wave company investment, trademarking the term "We" and forcing WeWork to buy it back from him) did not help. Neither did the comically absurd prospectus that Adam and Rebekah presented to underwriters (the writing of which was portrayed in hilariously nonsensical glory towards the end of the miniseries, and was just weird enough that I 100% believe it is exactly what went down as the Neumann's were crafting it) - a prospectus that, instead of following the traditional format of financial disclosure, instead amounted to a colorful brochure about an umbrella filing with three arms - WeWork, WeLive, and WeGrow - complete with photos and a LOT of information about Adam Neumann's biography, mission statement, values, dreams, goals... let's just say this document was absolutely ridiculed by financial experts and was likely the nail in the coffin for Neumann as CEO. He was asked to step down by the board at the end of September 2019. Softbank took control of the company in October and gave Adam $1.7 billion to step down as chairman of the board. (That's a golden parachute if I ever saw one.) The IPO was then postponed indefinitely. The company, pre-filing, had been valued at $47 billion. After this IPO debacle, the valuation dropped to $10 billion. In November 2019, WeWork laid off 2400 employees. I am so glad I left WeWork in 2015. Did I mention that already? Yeah. At any rate, WeCrashed is a great attempt at telling the story of WeWork's downfall as non-judgementally as possible, which I think is admirable given the absolutely wild story it is telling. The series is based on Wondery's podcast of the same name and they are pretty faithful to the source material. The Neumanns are clearly insane, but Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway (as Rebekah) do an admirable job of trying to portray them earnestly, as real people who really genuinely believe in what they are peddling. WeCrashed does attempt to use the character of Rebekah as perhaps a candidate for a redemption story - we see how Adam's workaholic tendencies cause their marriage to suffer and her own personal aspirations get squashed - but then she demands her own office, starts instructing HR to fire people for "bad energy", and comes up with the unbelievably horrendous idea that is WeGrow, so... any sympathy I may have found for her went out the window fairly quickly. Yes, they are grifters. Yes, Adam lies constantly about WeWork's profitability and valuation. But no, I genuinely do not think that Adam, Rebekah, or Miguel (before he was sidelined) were consciously trying to swindle anyone. They were drinking their own damn Kool-Aid too. If anything, they are just revealed as terrible businesspeople who knew how to talk a good game, but unlike Holmes, there was no intentional malice at play. Just... cluelessness, and a lot of New Agey language. WeWork still exists now, and it finally went public last year. I think the new leaders are fully aware that it is actually just a commercial real estate company, and that's just fine. It's one of the biggest in the world, after all. WeLive and WeGrow, thankfully, are long gone. WeCrashed stats Grifter Scale: 10 (but an oblivious 10) Bizarre Accent Scale: 1 (Adam Neumann grew up in Israel, his accent is authentically Israeli and Jared Leto does it well, so let's not call it bizarre, that's not nice) Bizarre Voice Scale: 2 (Rebekah Neumann's voice is lower in timbre than Hathaway's, but Hathaway does a decent job with it, and also that is actually what Rebekah Newman sounds like in real life, there are no fake lumberjacky shenanigans here, so let's not call it bizarre, that's not nice either) Is This Company Actually A Cult Scale: 10 (at least until 2019!) Faithfulness to Source Material: 7. There are some fictional characters invented to convey some of the real-life machinations of the company, and some timeline scrambling, but nothing that fundamentally changes the reality of WeWork in the Neumann Era Should You Watch It: Yes, unless you used to work at WeWork, in which case please, take it from me - don't. These memories are not fun ones. So let me leave you with this - why, all of a sudden, in the spring of 2022, did these shows about professional grifters, shady entrepreneurs, and toxic people come at us back to back to back to back? Why were three of them about startups? Why were all four of them roughly taking place during the same timeframe - in all honesty, these four shows exist in the same temporal universe, despite being on four different streaming networks. Why, now, is "Grifter Horror" in the zeitgeist? We love to gawk when the powerful fail - the rich and powerful - and I think that's why suddenly a rash of shows about real people who tried to shortcut making themselves rich suddenly cropped up this year. If I want to go down a pop psychology rabbit hole, maybe it's because many of us ended up suffering financially due to the first year of the pandemic. Maybe it's because the pandemic rendered many of us a feeling of powerlessness. So there is some satisfaction watching Delvey, Holmes, Kalanick, and the Neumanns try to grift - whether intentionally or due to earnest delusions of their own grandeur - and have their lives blow up. None of them win. All of them look foolish, corrupt, or maybe just plain stupid. But I think there's something larger at play here. The reason why all of these would-be grifters survived for so long is because financial institutions, venture capitalists, and investors are desperate to find “unicorns”. In finance, a "unicorn" is a privately held startup company with a current valuation of $1 billion or more. Theranos, Uber, and WeWork were considered "unicorns" in their respective heydays. Delvey, in her own way, was a "unicorn" on a slightly lower scale – she fooled a lot of people into thinking her financial worth was a lot more than it actually was. Unicorn hunting, to me, feels like a fool’s errand. If we look at these four miniseries, we can see that most perceived unicorns actually are not unicorns at all. Unicorns are fucking rare. That's why we call them unicorns. There is only one Apple. There is only one Google. There is only one Facebook. The technology they created is hard to duplicate and even harder to dominate at the level and scale that those companies have. And at the heart of it, the only real attractive thing about a Wall Street unicorn is the potential of a massive payout for all who get in on the ground floor. That’s why Anna Delvey was able to fool so many people into thinking she was an heiress. That’s why Elizabeth Holmes had Rupert Murdoch, Henry Kissinger, and George Shultz eating out of her hands. That’s why Bill Gurley believed in Travis Kalanick and invested in Uber. That’s why Adam Neumann’s woo-woo rhetoric about changing the world somehow through renting desks to freelancers appealed to a huge investor like Softbank. It’s really quite simple: at the end of the day, the reason why all of these grifters got as far as they did before meeting their downfall is because of capitalism. Money (or the perception of money) is so important that every potential investor or business partner or board member lost their damn minds and failed to complete proper due diligence – not just into the financials, but into the technology being created (Theranos) or the concept being sold (Anna Delvey Foundation, WeWork) or what exactly is to be gained, besides money, by “disruption”, (Uber) which is what caused these back-to-back unicorn collapses. And honestly, I think it stands to reason that it wouldn’t hurt to do some due diligence into the character of the entrepreneur asking for money before handing it over fist by fist, no matter how charismatic you find them. Sociopaths are known to be quite charismatic, after all. This lack of due diligence is a huge problem. Theranos could have hurt actual patients if it hadn't been stopped. WeWork actually did harm their employees with their toxic cult-like culture, even before the mass layoffs and the scuttled IPO damaged them financially. Anna Delvey not only defrauded her friends, but she also defrauded financial institutions – seemingly all just by speaking in a foreign accent, claiming extreme family wealth, and general shamelessness, which is mind-boggling. Uber, while not explicitly grifty in the way Delvey, Theranos, and WeWork were, was gaining a lot of notoriety for being a "disruptor" - another buzzy Wall Street word like “unicorn” that ultimately means YAY WE CAN MAKE SHITLOADS OF MONEY OFF OF THIS LET’S DO ITTTT. (Again, what is the goal of “disruption”? Did Uber really make the world a better place, at the end of the day?) Unicorn hunting is a problem, and it feels like a uniquely American one. I worry that it won't stop. I think people might be careful not to be duped by another Anna Delvey because her grift was so wild and so blatant. And maybe the biotech industry has learned a lesson from Theranos. Or maybe not: a chyron at the end of The Dropout notes that a female entrepreneur was advised by a potential investor to dye her blonde hair a different color so as not to resemble Holmes. (It seems the lesson they learned is “Don’t trust blonde women with ideas?” How depressing.) I honestly hope everyone on Wall Street has learned some sort of lesson from the WeWork disaster. But I'm not so sure. Everyone wants to find the next Steve Jobs. Everyone wants to say they believed in two crazy kids working out of a humble garage like Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Everyone wants to claim responsibility for discovering a Mark Zuckerberg-like wunderkind. Does the grift stop here, now that we’ve seen how the mighty have fallen? Delvey and Holmes in jail (or about to be), Kalanick and Neumann exiled from the companies they’ve founded? I hope so, but I’m not holding my breath. Reeya Banerjee Reeya is a musician and writer based in NY's Capital District. Her debut album The Way Up was released on January 27, 2022. She can frequently be seen in her car on the NYS Thruway cursing traffic on her way to the Hudson Valley for band rehearsals or to Brooklyn for recording sessions. In her other life, she works as a staff accountant for a management company that oversees veterinary practices nationwide, enjoys watching Law & Order SVU returns while eating gummy bears, and has a film degree from Vassar College that she does not use.

Content Warning: This article contains detailed descriptions of rape, sexual assault, and murder. They called her Damini. The police and the press in India do not release the real names of assault victims, and so the public called her Damini, in reference to a 1993 Hindi film released in 1993 about a woman's struggle against society and her family for justice for a rape victim. She was a 23-year-old woman who was brutally gang-raped on a bus in South Delhi on December 16, 2012, on her way home from watching a movie with a male friend. The six men attacked her and her companion, leaving him bruised but battering her almost literally to a pulp, raping her one-by-one, biting her face and body, beating her with an iron rod, inserting that rod into her vagina and anus repeatedly, and eventually pulling her intestines from her body through her vaginal opening. She and her friend were then thrown off the bus, naked, without their wallets or phones, and left for dead in a ditch. That's where the Delhi police found them and she was rushed to Safdarjung Hospital, where she underwent multiple surgeries to save her life. She was eventually airlifted to a trauma center in Singapore, thirteen days after the attack, for treatment, but it was too late; she passed away two days after reaching Singapore. I was 27 years old when Damini was raped, living in Poughkeepsie, muddling through a period of recession-related unemployment, and my ears were still ringing from the 12-12-12 Hurricane Sandy Benefit Concert/Telethon, which my boyfriend and I had attended in person at Madison Square Garden a few days prior. The news of her rape was the first time a crime in India made international news. She was everywhere, all over CNN and MSNBC, and even Fox News, the first story that broke through the incessant hurricane coverage in the United States. And what happened to her shook me to my core. My mother grew up in New Delhi. My parents met in New Delhi when my father was in graduate school and she was clerking in the Attorney General's office. My father's memories of Delhi are hazy and nostalgic, tinged with the romance of the era - the 1970s were a formative time in Independent India's political history, and my mother's family, intellectuals, and members of the government were on the front lines. He remembers the smells of the street food stalls, the buzz of the university campus amidst protests against the Vietnam War and Indira Gandhi's State of Emergency, going to movies and concerts with my mother, and Bollywood songs playing from every store as you walked down the street. My mother was a Delhi girl. I was born and raised in the United States, but I have always felt a deep and soulful connection to New Delhi, because of my mother, because of my parents, because of my anachronistic (for a Bengali) love of delicious Punjabi food, because of my fluency in Hinglish - the amalgam of Hindi, Punjabi, and English spoken in the city. Delhi has changed a lot since my parents left in 1978. It's now known for being a city that is not safe for women, a city where women are frequently groped on public transit and in crowds, cat-called and harassed, and assaulted in public spaces, a city where women have absolutely no faith in the police force to even report when these assaults happen. Damini's story cast a huge international spotlight on the reality of life in Delhi for women, and it certainly was not a flattering one. When Damini's attackers were found, captured, arrested, and questioned, they said that they had targeted her and her friend because they felt the couple was too free in their open affection for each other, and this flew directly in conflict with what they thought of as true Indian Hindu values - of conformity, of modesty, of submission. Religious fundamentalists are ultimately, all the same, no matter which religion we're discussing. At the end of the day, all they care about is ensuring that women do not have the right to be free, safe, and autonomous in their bodies and in society. I hadn't been to visit my family in India since 2005. Because of what happened to the woman they called Damini, I decided that I would never go back. It's been ten years, and I've held to that decision faithfully. I always will. I'm a blue-haired, tattooed, curvy Indian-American woman with a mod haircut and a thick Mid-Hudson New York accent. I'm exactly the kind of woman that monsters like the men on that bus would target, for being too free, for being too independent, for not adhering to a very specific brand of seedhi-saadhi femininity. No, I won't ever visit India again. Sorry. Not sorry. Delhi Crime is an Indian crime drama streaming series from Netflix written and directed by Richie Mehta. In 2019, its first season was released, set in the aftermath of the 2012 bus gang rape. Somehow, I didn't become aware of this show's existence until about two months ago, when Netflix started advertising promos for its second season. When I discovered Delhi Crime and saw what the first season was about, I knew I would be binging it posthaste. Season 1 of Delhi Crime hews very similar in style to Law & Order 's "ripped from the headlines" storytelling - in the opening title sequence, there is a chyron that states that the script is based on the actual case files from this notorious gang rape. It begins with the rape victim and her friend being found on the side of the road and follows the Delhi Police in its five-day manhunt to apprehend the culprits. The team on the case is headed up by Deputy Commissioner of Police Vartika Chaturvedi (Shefali Shah), her deputy, Inspector Bhupendra Singh (Rajesh Tailang), Neeti Singh (Rasika Dugal), a new member of the Indian Police Service who Chaturvedi takes on as a sort of protege, Police Commissioner and Chaturvedi's immediate superior Kumar Vijay (Adil Hussain), and a large team of Inspectors, Sub-Inspectors, District Station Heads, and forensics analysts featuring a sprawling cast of actors from Indian TV and theater. DCP Vartika Chaturvedi is an imposing figure, highly respected by her team and a fierce advocate for victims, straight from the playbook of Law & Order: SVU 's Olivia Benson (one gets the feeling that Chaturvedi and Benson would be friends, or at least drinking buddies). When she hears about the gang rape, it hits her personally. Her daughter, Chandni, is desperate to leave Delhi because she is tired of feeling unsafe in her own hometown, and has decided to attend college in Toronto. Up until Chaturvedi is informed of the gang rape, she is convinced that she can show Chandni the good parts of Delhi and convince her to stay. Her experience in investigating this case allows her to fully understand her daughter's desire to leave. She and her team ultimately capture all of the men responsible for the attack, but her faith in the city she loves is shaken. Her passion for the job, however, is only inflamed. Shefali Shah is absolutely phenomenal in this role, her face capable of expressing so much with only the slightest look, a slight smirk, a flashing of her wide, dark eyes. Her ability to command a room, dress down an insubordinate officer, interrogate a rapist, and manage the political maneuvering that her boss has to play in order to maintain control of the investigation is so nuanced and skillful. You never forget that she is a woman in a position of power in an institution that historically doesn't put women in positions of power, but she carries it well; if there is a chip on her shoulder, it can't be seen. I have been a fan of Shah since her role as Rhea, the cousin of the bride in Mira Nair's 2002 film Monsoon Wedding (my favorite film of all time, also set in New Delhi - the version of New Delhi my father remembers), and in the past 20 years, she has matured from a charmingly wry and sassy young girl into an absolute force of nature. This is the role of a lifetime for her and I am so thrilled that a wider audience is getting to witness her in action. Season 1 of Delhi Crime is a masterstroke of writing, plotting, and acting. Over seven episodes, the suspense of the investigation and manhunt in juxtaposition with the intensive medical care of the rape victim (called "Deepika" in this series and played with harrowing vulnerability by Abhilasha Singh) had me absolutely riveted, even though I knew exactly how the story was going to end. (For those who don't know - in real life, and on the show, the men responsible for the attack were caught, arrested, and convicted. One committed suicide in prison, one was a minor at the time of the attack and served three years in a juvenile rehabilitation center, and the remaining four are still on death row. Damini died from her injuries, and her male companion escaped mostly unhurt but gave a salacious TV interview about his experiences shortly before Damini's death, which is pretty fucking gross, dude.) People who know me know that despite my love of Bollywood movies one of the things I vehemently hate is the artificial and unrealistic way that English is deployed in the screenwriting; the writers of Delhi Crime absolutely nail the way people in Delhi speak to each other colloquially in a combination of Hindi, English, and Punjabi (sometimes all in the same sentence - Hinglish!), and the naturalistic dialogue is a breath of fresh air from an Indian production. The show received very positive reviews from critics, and at the International Emmy Awards in September 2020, Delhi Crime received the award for Outstanding Drama Series - the first ever Indian series to win that award. It was renewed for a second season with the main cast returning. I absolutely loved the first season of Delhi Crime , but if I had one thing to criticize, it would be the way the Delhi police force is glorified in the story. In 2012, it was generally known that Delhi police made many terrible mistakes in their handling of Damini's case, and they were thoroughly dragged in the media for it. Granted, this show is from the point of view of the police officers and pulled directly from the actual case files, so some pro-police bias is natural. That said, given what we know from history about Damini's case and the police's missteps, the Olivia Benson-ing of the officers in this story feels a bit disingenuous. (But hey, people say that Benson the Angel Officer is a disingenuous depiction of an NYPD officer, so... let's just accept that policing is problematic in many countries.) Season 2 of Delhi Crime dropped on Netflix on August 26, 2022, and I was curious to see what DCP Chaturvedi and her team would be up against this time. Interestingly, this season did not claim to be based on actual Delhi police case files and instead told a fictional story about a crew of serial killers who seem to be members of the Kachcha Baniyan Gang. The Kachcha Baniyan Gang is known for terrorizing many cities in India targeting wealthy elderly people, brutally murdering them with hammers, axes, and knives, stealing jewelry and valuables, and looting their victims’ kitchens of liquor and food. They wear face masks and cover themselves in oil before their attacks to make it hard for their victims to fight back (due to the slipperiness of the oil). The season begins with Chaturvedi and her team being called to a house in a wealthy neighborhood where two elderly couples have been brutally murdered. Inspector Bhupendra Singh is the first to notice that the criminals' MO is similar to the Kachcha Baniyan Gang, but Chaturvedi is skeptical, noting that the gang has not been active in Delhi since the 1990s. While Chaturvedi's team is trying to wrap their arms around the scope of the first murder, a second murder with similar victims occurs, and due to a leak from within the police force, the news media explodes with stories about the Kachcha Baniyan Gang being back in action, frightening the citizens of Delhi. Chaturvedi has a sense that they are not dealing with the actual Kachcha Baniyan Gang, and when Officer Neeti Singh discovers a common link between the victims in both murders, they realize that they are dealing with a copycat. After further investigation and narrowing down of potential suspects, they finally find their main culprit, a woman who goes by the name of Karishma (Tillotama Shome), who is the leader of the copycat gang, driven by greed, ambition, resentment of her lower class status, and mental illness. During a somber conversation between Karishma and Chaturvedi (a fantastic reunion between Shah and Shome, who was also in Monsoon Wedding ), Chaturvedi is taken aback to realize that Karishma doesn't really have a coherent explanation for her murderous rampage, and sadly has to inform the daughter of one of the murder victims that sometimes, criminals just can't clearly articulate what drove them to the desperation it takes to commit such heinous crimes. In some ways, Season 2 of Delhi Crime isn't as strong as Season 1 - the plot gets bogged down in the drama of Neeti Singh's troubled marriage, Chaturvedi's daughter struggling at university in Toronto, and long scenes with Karishma and the three men she has intimidated into being her gang without much insight into how or why these three men would follow her in her psychotic escapades. But in other ways, by not being a direct depiction of an actual, famous crime and forced to be faithful to the historical record, Delhi Crime Season 2 has the freedom to offer critique into the corruption at the higher levels of the Delhi Police - Chaturvedi is flat-out ordered by her boss to tell the media that they have apprehended two members of the Kachcha Baniyan Gang responsible for the murders and show them to the cameras in order to curry favor with the public and with Delhi's Chief Minister, despite the two men they have in custody at the time having alibis for the crime and proof that they are in no way affiliated with the Kachcha Baniyan Gang. It also, through the depiction of a retired police chief who was an expert in achieving convictions in Kachchan Baniyan Gang murders as a consultant during his long career, investigates the legacy of British colonial racism in India. The Kachcha Baniyan Gang were largely made up of members of tribes and communities that the British considered "born criminals", notified as such under the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871. The law was repealed in 1949, two years after India gained independence from the British Empire, but it did little to change the stigma against these tribes, now known as "denotified tribes" or DNTs. In 1952, the Habitual Offenders Act was ratified, which borrowed principles similar to those in the 1871 British act - "born criminals" were now called "habitual criminals" and as a result, instead of pursuing actual criminals, law enforcement officials criminalized entire tribes. This law was eventually also repealed but the negative image of DNTs has persisted, and DNT communities are some of the most deprived and destitute communities in India. The retired police chief who comes to consult with Chaturvedi's team is an outright bigot, who 100% believes that the British were right and DNTs are "born criminals", and his "brilliant" method of investigating these heinous murders involves raiding a slum in Delhi inhabited by a DNT community, bringing literally every member of that community into Chaturvedi's police station, and haranguing and abusing them to confess to resurrecting the Kachcha Baniyan gang to commit these murders. Eventually, it comes to light that this consultant has also been telling the DNTs in police custody that if they pay him off, he'll release them and eliminate them from the suspect list. (Once Chaturvedi discovers this, she basically tells the consultant to go fuck himself, thankfully.) I did not know anything about DNTs in India or their long history of being targets of racial violence at the hands of the British and the Indian police force, and I felt that this particular plotline was a thoughtful and sensitive way of exploring the subtle nuances of Delhi society that inform the way crimes occur in the city and the way the police operate. Delhi Crime is at its best when it interrogates the reasons why crime happens in Delhi due to the disparity between the lower classes and the elite in Season 2, and also when it shows how overtaxed and underfunded the Delhi police is in Season 1, offering explanations - but not excuses - for the institution's failures. It remains to be seen whether there will be a Season 3 of Delhi Crime - at the end of Season 2, Chaturvedi is congratulated by Police Commissioner Kumar Vijay for cracking the case and told she will be getting a promotion within the Indian Police Service - which will involve being transferred to a remote area of the country. (Because yes, he is still mad that she defied his orders to identify innocent men as guilty to pacify the rabid news media.) I don't know how Delhi Crime works as a show without Shefali Shah as DCP Vartika Chaturvedi at its center - if they do a new season, I cannot imagine being interested in following a different DCP, and if they keep Chaturvedi as its central character it won't be Delhi Crime anymore, seeing as she's about to be shipped off to some remote hinterland of the subcontinent. But regardless of what the future holds for this series, I highly recommend watching these two seasons on Netflix - if you're a fan of police procedurals, if you're a fan of true crime, if you're interested in the way policing works outside of the United States, if you're interested in the way India's colonial past still has societal reverberations in modern India, if you're a fan of Monsoon Wedding , or if you just value well-written and well-acted shows, there is more than plenty to love here. Reeya Banerjee Staff Writer Reeya is a musician and writer based in NY's Capital District. Her debut album The Way Up was released on January 27, 2022. She can frequently be seen in her car on the NYS Thruway cursing traffic on her way to the Hudson Valley for band rehearsals or to Brooklyn for recording sessions. In her other life, she works as a staff accountant for a management company that oversees veterinary practices nationwide, enjoys watching Law & Order SVU returns while eating gummy bears, and has a film degree from Vassar College that she does not use.

Note: This article contains extensive spoilers for the entire runs of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul . Well folks, it's been a couple of months since AMC's Better Call Saul - simultaneously a prequel and sequel to Breaking Bad - aired its series finale. There have been many, many words spilled about both shows over the years, and a multitude of critical analyses of its ending has been published since the final episode on August 15, 2022. I don't think the world needs another Better Call Saul think piece at this point. That being said, as someone who watched Breaking Bad in its entirety during its initial run on AMC (back when it, Mad Men , and The Walking Dead were establishing the network as a contender in the realm of Prestige TV), and someone who kind of forgot to watch Better Call Saul until I realized it was almost over, at which point I binged it hard over the course of three months to catch up in time for the finale, I do have some thoughts about the many wonderful characters we were introduced to over the course of this franchise. Specifically, I think both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul gave us some of the best villains in television history, and so here, I would like to give you a ranking and breakdown of the 15 most important villains in this universe, in reverse order of villainy. So without further ado… let justice be done though the heavens fall. 15. Kim Wexler Kim Wexler, lawyer extraordinaire and erstwhile girlfriend (and later wife) of Jimmy McGill - the man who became Saul Goodman - ended up turning into a character who was the beating heart of Better Call Saul . It's easy to argue that Bette r Call Saul is just as much her show as it was Jimmy/Saul's. But was she a villain? Well... not technically. However, despite Kim being the one character who knew and loved Jimmy for who he was, and inspired him to try to be a better man, her biggest flaw is that from time to time, she would get sucked into one of Jimmy's scams and enjoy herself more than she probably should. She was her own worst enemy in this way, in one case tanking a very important career opportunity in service of one of his scams. And to be clear, the scam in question was just as much hers as it was his. In fact, she was the one who came up with the idea of the scam: to ruin the career and reputation of Howard Hamlin, her (and Jimmy's) former boss at Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill, basically because... they were sick of feeling condescended to by him, and hoped that by discrediting him they could speed up the settlement on a lawsuit for which both Kim and Jimmy were entitled to compensation. The scam worked - too well, as because of Kim's and Jimmy's machinations, it led Howard to be exactly in the wrong place at the wrong time, where he was killed in cold blood by... well, we'll get to that later. The shock of Howard's end (HA HA I CRACK MYSELF UP) shook Kim to her core, and she resigned from the bar, left Jimmy, and relocated to Florida, saying that she and Jimmy together were bad for everyone around them. Years later, she returned to Albequerque to own up to her role in Howard's death as well. Kim had a tiny streak of villainy in her, but in the end, her own moral compass compelled her to try to make things right as best she could given the circumstances. Major props to Rhea Seahorn for her wonderful portrayal of Kim - she was robbed at the Emmys this year, and I hope they’ll make it up to her next year given that it’ll be Better Call Saul ’s last year of eligibility. 14. Jesse Pinkman Jesse, Jesse, Jesse. In many ways Breaking Bad 's analog to Kim Wexler (the sidekick who got unwittingly dragged into someone else’s mess), Jesse was a good-hearted kid who made a series of bad decisions that led to his downfall, starting with his descent into crystal meth addiction, which estranged him from his family. Motivated by greed (and being manipulated by Walter White), even after achieving sobriety, he became the faithful assistant to Albequerque's leading meth manufacturer. Is he a villain? Well, he did shoot poor Gale Boetticher point-blank in the head, but again as a direct result of Walt's manipulation, and the trauma of that experience marked him ever since. He tried several times after that to get out of Walt's orbit, even going so far as to agree to testify against him to the DEA, but in the end, the poor kid basically became a slave to his and Walt's final tormentors. His triumphant escape from captivity at the end of Breaking Bad , and his eventual grander escape to Alaska after being disappeared by Saul Goodman's infamous vacuum cleaner repairman/professional disappear-er (as depicted in El Camino , the companion movie Vince Gilligan made to give Jesse’s story proper closure) give some hope that he will be able to turn his life around and finally find some real happiness. Aaron Paul won three well-deserved Emmys for his role as Jesse Pinkman and will probably be most famous for the phrase “YEAH, BITCH! MAGNETS!!!” for the rest of his life. I think he’d be fine with that. 13. Ignacio "Nacho" Varga Nacho is another Jesse Pinkman analog in Better Call Saul - a good-hearted, very intelligent young man who made a series of bad decisions early in his life that led to his downfall. In Nacho's case, this was getting involved with the Salamanca cartel as a drug dealer. He hated the Salamancas, hated what his life had turned into, and tried time and time again to escape, only to be sucked back in, first by Tuco Salamanca's imprisonment (they needed a new money counter/enforcer), then by Hector Salamanca's fateful stroke (they needed someone to manage the whole Salamanca operation), then by Gustavo Fring realizing that Nacho could be a very effective mole in Gus' own long-game vendetta against the Salamancas, essentially forcing him to play double agent with the threat of harm coming to Nacho's (absolute sweetheart) father, who kept telling Nacho to call the cops on these fuckers and be done with it. (Alas, it's not that simple, Papa.) Is Nacho a villain? Well, he was a drug dealer, and he was violent (when forced to be), and he orchestrated the events leading to Hector's stroke (but who could blame him?), and he was directly responsible for the deaths of several non-cartel-affiliated employees at the home of... well, we'll get to that later. But his character arc is one of the most heart-rending tragedies in the Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul universe, as he essentially sacrifices himself to keep his father safe and to keep the Salamancas from catching wind of Gus' treachery. He dies by his own hand, but his dignity remains intact. If he'd just stayed away from Tuco when he was a kid, who knows where life could have taken him? Michael Mando gives a very affecting performance as Nacho; the episode where he realizes that he was set up by Gus to be sacrificed is a masterclass in making Shakespearian-level betrayal and tragedy believable on a television show about drug dealers. I’m excited to see more from him. 12. Jimmy McGill Here's where we get into some tricky territory. Slippin' Jimmy was a small-time conman, making messes all over his hometown of Cicero until his older brother Chuck finally rescued him and tried to help him remake his life. Despite Jimmy's conman background (and his propensity for finding more avenues to keep scamming others in Albequerque), he desperately did want to become a better person, both for Chuck and also for Kim, the love of his life. When Chuck was homebound on FMLA for severe mental illness, Jimmy took care of him with tenderness and affection. When he saw avenues to help Kim succeed in her career, he was supportive (sometimes too supportive). But is Jimmy a villain? Once he became aware of how little Chuck seemed to respect him, he stopped at nothing to discredit him and inadvertently caused the circumstances that led to Chuck's maybe-suicide. And of course, he came up with and executed the fairly elaborate scheme that Kim proposed, leading to Howard's horrible demise. Not to mention how easily he fell into the role of "friend to the cartel." And then of course there's... well, we'll get to that later. But in the end - and again, because he wanted to do right by Kim - he owned up to his mistakes and bad deeds in court and allowed for a measure of justice to be found for the deaths of DEA Agents Hank Schrader and Steve Gomez, not to mention the myriad other deaths that the late Walter White was responsible for. Bob Odenkirk is a comedy legend - famous not only for his work with David Cross on Mr. Show with Bob and David but also as a long-time writer for Saturday Night Live . Want to know how much of a legend he is? He wrote the infamous “I LIVE IN A VAN DOWN BY THE RIVER” sketch, featuring Chris Farley as motivational speaker Matt Foley. Jimmy McGill forced Odenkirk to tap into a more dramatic side of performance, and he does an exceptional job with some very sensitive character work. 11. Howard Hamlin When we first meet Howard in Better Call Saul , he sure seems like a villain. I mean, look at that perfectly coiffed hair. The impeccable tan. The bespoke suits. The Jaguar with the "Namast3" vanity plates. Everything about him screamed "silver-spooned douchebag". Then there’s the arrogance with which he takes Kim away from her office and sends her to document review purgatory after one mistake? The condescending way he spoke to Jimmy ("Charlie Hustle!")? The way he always took Chuck's side against Jimmy, and also enabled Chuck to remain locked in his mental illness? And let's not forget the way he dumped his theory about Chuck's death being a suicide into Jimmy's lap just to make himself feel less guilty for his own role in Chuck's downfall (by forcing him to retire from HHM). That being said, over time it is clear that Howard’s affection for Kim and for Jimmy is genuine. His loyalty towards Chuck is not misguided - Chuck was his mentor, and a damn good one - he just took it too far for too long. When Kim or Jimmy called him out on his missteps, his first instinct was always to acknowledge their feelings and ask how he could make things right. He struggled hard to repair his marriage with his wife. He took therapy seriously. He wanted to be the best version of himself. Even at the very end of his life, when it was clear that there was real danger afoot because of... well, we'll get to that later... he tried in the moment to diffuse the situation. Unfortunately, he did not succeed. RIP Howard. Like many of the seeming villains in the Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul universe, you were fundamentally a good egg who made some terrible choices that led to your untimely end. Patrick Fabian does a terrific job embodying Howard, a character that could so easily go off the rails as caricature. He portrays a very complex man under the veneer of comfort, wealth, and a polished appearance, and Howard’s death was very upsetting because of how well Fabian depicted Howard’s humanity and capacity for compassion. (Unrelatedly: Can someone please make a TV show or movie where Patrick Fabian and Neil Patrick Harris play brothers? They would be so perfect together.) 10. Chuck McGill Here's where things are going to get murkier. Did Chuck love his little brother Jimmy? Yes. Did Chuck respect his little brother Jimmy? He tried to. He really did. He was proud of Jimmy for putting himself through law school and passing the bar. He even stood up and vouched for Jimmy when he officially joined the New Mexico bar. But ultimately, the trauma of knowing Jimmy was his parents' favorite child even though Chuck was a high achiever, having to repeatedly save Jimmy from himself during his Slippin' Jimmy days, and the perfectionistic pressure he put on himself to be the best lawyer he could (along with his deep love of the law), forced him to turn on Jimmy and pursue action to get him disbarred for, let's be frank, perfectly legitimate reasons. Jimmy deserved to be punished for breaking and entering Chuck’s home and tampering with evidence - even if his only motive was that it would help Kim’s career (see above regarding Jimmy sometimes being too supportive of Kim). But did Chuck really do it because he loved the law, or did he do it because he was just fucking sick and tired of Jimmy? Probably a little of both, but the level of vitriol he spewed about his little brother, who, as we noted before, heroically took care of him through the worst of his mental illness, gives one the sense that he was motivated more by spite than by an altruistic need to protect the law as sacred. Chuck didn't deserve his horrible end, dying as his house burned down around him, but Howard wasn't wrong to ask him to retire and couldn’t have known that it would cause a mental health relapse (and even if he did, that’s not the right way to make business decisions). Chuck's decision-making was entirely impaired by that point by anger, vengeance, and arrogance, and that's not a good recipe for a leader. Chuck's villainy is well-earned. Michael McKean, another comedy legend most famous for being in Christopher Guest’s company of actors, does a great job walking the line of keeping the viewers guessing as to how he truly feels about his little brother - to the point where even after his death we are not quite sure. McKean and Odenkirk’s physical resemblance and natural chemistry make the relationship feel very real, lived-in, and like you know the whole backstory even though we’re only given pieces of it. It was sad to lose him at the end of Season 3, but the plotline had served its purpose and it was time for Chuck to go. 9. Mike Ehrmantraut Here's where we get even murkier because Mike Ehrmantraut was a fan-favorite character on both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul . But Mike is not a good guy. Sure, he's a loving presence in his daughter-in-law Stacy's life and a doting Pop-Pop to Kaylee, but his history as a dirty cop in Philly directly resulted in the death of his son Matty, and that history is what led him to continue to make decisions that led him down a criminal path, culminating in his becoming Gus Fring's fixer and a behind-the-scenes power player in the ongoing Fring vs Salamanca cartel civil war. He killed poor Werner Ziegler, who just wanted a long weekend to spend with his wife after nearly a year trapped as the foreman of a crew building what became Gus' meth superlab (eventually run by one Walter White). He sacrificed Nacho in order to save Gus from... well, we'll get to that later. He helped cover up the evidence of Howard's murder in Kim and Jimmy's apartment, and later he helped cover up the evidence of the death-by-overdose of Jesse Pinkman's girlfriend Jane. He lived by a strange moral code, trying to talk Gus out of killing Werner and Nacho while also vowing to Nacho's father that he would help ensure there would be justice after Nacho's death (implying blood for blood and disgusting Papa Varga to no end). He helped Gus achieve his ultimate goal - a long game that stretched back decades - of carnage in killing off all of Don Eladio's men and specifically every living Salamanca. He threatened to kill Lydia Rodarte-Quayle, head of logistics at Madrigal Electromotive (and his and Gus' boss) in her home while her daughter was asleep in the other room. And maybe worst of all, he didn't do a good enough job of warning Saul Goodman to stay away from Walter White. His death in Breaking Bad at the hand of Walter was heartbreaking, but though he may have meant well and cared in his own grumpy way about Nacho and about Jesse, in the end, he just did what he was told. He followed orders. And many people died as a result. We like Mike, but we probably shouldn't. He's definitely a villain. Jonathan Banks is absolutely brilliant at playing the gruff, cynical, world-weary Mike. His scenes with his granddaughter are a wonderful counterpoint to the horror of his job. Mike’s life is complicated, and Jonathan Banks shows it not just in his voice but his physicality. Amazing work. 8. Don Eladio This is a no-brainer; he runs the branch of the cartel that the Salamancas and Gus operate within, he's craven, crass, and gross, he doesn't care who of his people lives or dies as long as he gets his money, and he has terrible taste in shirts. This is a bad dude. Absolutely a villain. Steven Bauer looks like he’s having the time of his life whenever he’s on-screen as Eladio, and there’s something just so infectious and enjoyable about watching him perform like that, even though he’s playing someone objectively awful. 7. The Twins Also known as Marco and Leonel Salamanca. These motherfuckers are scary as fuck. They don't speak, they just kill. Everyone. Always. They threatened to kill Mike's granddaughter, for fuck's sake. They almost killed Hank Schrader. They literally shot Nacho in the shoulder and the kidney in order to stage the murder of another cartel lackey and not be detected by Gus, and left him in a field to bleed out and hopefully be rescued in time. Villains. There's no ambiguity here. Daniel and Luis Moncada play the twins, and I gotta say, they’re pretty good at scaring the shit out of people without saying a word. Kudos, gentlemen. 6. Hector Salamanca This guy. This fucking guy. He raised the twins to be vengeful killing machines through abuse. He shot Gus' partner (and maybe lover) Max point blank in the head and let him die in Don Eladio's pool (oh yeah, and Eladio did nothing about it) - setting in course Gus' long-game plan to seek revenge. He hated Gus seemingly because he was Chilean and dark-skinned, so on top of the murderous streak, he's racist and xenophobic. He forced Nacho's sweet father to turn his upholstery business into a front for drug running. And even after being permanently paralyzed by a stroke, he continued to orchestrate violence behind the scenes in order to get at Gus or anyone who threatened his family. But Hector is a particularly scary brand of evil because he's also smart; despite Nacho dying while covering for Gus, Hector knew, somehow, that Gus was responsible for the death of... well, we'll get to that later... and never, ever gave up on that instinct. He went out swinging (or I guess more accurately, dinging that damn bell), but he was a horrible person and I don't feel sorry for him in the slightest. Absolute villain. Mark Margolis spent the entire run of Breaking Bad in a wheelchair playing Hector post-paralysis; it was nice to see him on his feet, speaking, and in action in Better Call Saul before the stroke, to get a real sense of how intimidating he is. It’s an impressive feat that he’s just as scary sitting in a wheelchair ringing a bell angrily as he is walking around terrorizing everyone. 5. Todd Alquist (and some Nazi randos) I have been very vocal with anyone who will listen to me that the final season of Breaking Bad suffered once the Mexican cartel ceased to be the bad guys and Todd Alquist and his Neo-Nazi family became Walt and Jesse's final nemeses. The cartel villains were complex and interesting, and the machinations of the cartel are frightening (I grew up in California, trust me, the Mexican drug cartel is scary beyond belief), which really made the stakes of the situation that Walter got himself and Jesse very high and full of tension. Then, once the cartel was dispatched with, we get the Neo-Nazis. They're Nazis. We hate them. Of course, we hate them. Why wouldn't we hate them? We’re supposed to hate them. Nazis are bad. And worst of all, Todd's Nazi family was so thinly characterized that it wasn't even possible to really care about them as individual people. We just were glad that they all die in the end, because, again, NAZIS. That said, Todd, himself is a fucking psycho. He killed a little innocent kid who was in the wrong place at the wrong time! He killed Jesse's girlfriend Andrea and left her son motherless just to fuck with Jesse’s head! He kept Jesse as a prisoner in chains locked in a cage forced to cook blue meth day in and day out, and treated him like a pet who he abused for fun! Todd is bad! Todd is very, very bad! Jesse Plemons does give good psycho, and it was the first time audiences got to see him play a bad guy after years of being a good one as Landry on Friday Night Lights . Playing Todd opened a lot of doors for him, leading him to the career successes he’s having now (he was nominated for an Oscar this year!). Yay Jesse Plemons! Boo Nazis (and bad writing). 4. Saul Goodman (Aha, you see what I've done here, right? I’m so clever.) Jimmy McGill was only ambiguously a villain, but there was a good heart in there and he tried hard to be honorable for the people he loved, so I ranked Jimmy fairly low in this villain countdown. However, once he lost Kim after the tragedy of Howard's murder, he slipped not just back into Slippin' Jimmy but whole-hog into being Saul Goodman - who initially was only meant to be his DBA alias when his law license was reinstated. Without Kim there to push him to keep trying to be a good person, Jimmy turned Saul into a full-fledged despicable human being, representing any criminal lowlife who would pay, giving advice on money laundering to the Whites, preying on vulnerable victims of crime, mistreating his long-suffering receptionist Francesca, sleeping with hookers, and completely embracing his reputation as the official lawyer to the cartel and the financial perks that came with that. One of the intriguing things about Better Call Saul is the way that it recontextualizes the story we were told in Breaking Bad , and we see this firsthand after he talks his way out of trouble when Walt and Jesse kidnap him to the desert (somewhat ineptly) and sees the impeccable professionalism of Walt's meth-making operation in the RV meth lab. Mike warns him to stay far away from Walter - he's an amateur and will easily get in way over his head - but Saul's greed knows no bounds, and all he can see is how much money he could make as Walt's lawyer if Mike can orchestrate connecting Walt with Gus Fring to run his underground superlab. In Breaking Bad , we're led to believe that Walt's hubris is what led to the chaos he wrought. In Better Call Saul , we see that it was Saul Goodman's interference that put Walt on Gus' radar and escalated the Heisenberg business rapidly. So in a way, everything tragic that went down in Breaking Bad is Saul's fault. Saul maybe didn't know how bad it would get, but he's definitely a villain when you put it all into the larger context of these two shows together as one contiguous story. When Saul Goodman was first introduced as a Breaking Bad character he was almost a joke - some tension-relieving comic relief - and casting Odenkirk (as noted before, a comedy legend), made a lot of sense. When you see the juxtaposition of him as Jimmy McGill against him as Saul Goodman, the mind boggles at the amount of deep character study Odenkirk had to do to keep these two separate alter egos as very different people, but similar enough that it would be believable that it was the same man. Absolutely tremendous work. Odenkirk needs an Emmy. Television Academy, I’m watching you next year. You know what you have to do. 3. Gustavo Fring The fastidious-bordering-on-OCD owner of the Los Pollos Hermanos fast food chain - an elaborate money laundering front for his participation in drug trafficking for Don Eladio (as well as his own rogue meth distribution pipeline via Walter White's product manufactured north of the border) - Gustavo Fring was, for me, the most intriguing villain on Breaking Bad when it was airing. There are allusions to a questionable past in Chile (which we never learn more about, much to my disappointment). There's the tragedy of the loss of his partner Max at Hector Salamanca's cruel hand. There's his frightening display of violence-as-power-play when he casually kills his henchman Victor in front of Walt and Jesse as a warning after Gale Boetticher's death. There's the astute instinct he has upon learning of the death of... well, we'll get to that later... that proves to be right. There are his intentional displays of philanthropy, patronage, and volunteering for meaningful causes in Albequerque (including being a supporter of the police force and the DEA) that are a part of his calculated way to never be suspected as a drug dealer. And there's his epic, epic long-game of revenge against the cartel and the Salamancas for Max's death that was years in the making. If Hector Salamanca is evil-but-smart, Gus is a fucking bonafide evil genius. And were it not for his hubris - for his need to go taunt Hector in his assisted living facility after he, Mike, and Jesse return from the carnage of his epic revenge plot at Don Eladio's house - Gus would have gotten away with becoming the de facto leader of the trafficking of crystal meth in the Southwest. Alas, Walt and Jesse knew that he would do that, and helped Hector booby-trap his wheelchair in order to orchestrate an explosive (literally!) murder-suicide, blowing half of Gus' face off in the process. (Gus, dapper till the end, manages to straighten his tie before collapsing to his death.) Unfortunately, this leaves room for a certain bitter former chemistry teacher and cancer survivor to try to become the meth kingpin of the Southwest, and... yeah. It doesn't end well. Giancarlo Esposito has been a favorite of mine since his days on Homicide: Life on the Street and his performance as the meticulous Gustavo Fring is masterful; I was truly sad when he was killed on Breaking Bad . It was nice to get to see him as a major player and gain some more context in Better Call Saul , but come on Vince Gilligan - tell me what the deal is with this mysterious Chilean backstory? Was Gus working for the CIA to help Pinochet take power before relocating to Mexico? I gotta know! 2. Walter White And here we are - the second most awful but compelling villain in the Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul universe and the man who ruined it all for everyone he knows and lots of people he didn't. Say his name: Heisenberg, also known as Walter White. He is the One Who Knocks. Breaking Bad creator and showrunner Vince Gilligan has always stated that his mission for the overall arc of Breaking Bad is watching "Mr. Chips turn into Scarface." And indeed, that is what happens - Walter White turns into Heisenberg. But I never thought it was that simple. Yes, his purported plan at the beginning of Breaking Bad was to manufacture and sell enough meth to support his family when he died of the terminal lung cancer he was diagnosed with in the pilot episode, but by the time the final season rolled around, Walt's cancer was in remission and he arrogantly told Jesse that after Gus' death they weren't just in the meth business anymore, they were in the "empire business." (Jesse quite correctly asks if a meth empire is really something to be proud of.) He had made more money than his family could ever need by cooking meth for Gus in the superlab, more than his long-suffering wife Skylar could even try to launder through the car wash they bought specifically for money laundering (thank you Saul Goodman for that advice, by the way). He could have stopped. But he didn't want to. And as he finally confesses to Skylar in the Breaking Bad series finale, in the end, he didn't do it for her, or for their kids. "I did it for me," he says. "I liked it. I was good at it. And I was really... I was alive." After years of bitterness about losing his shares in Grey Matter (the company he co-founded with two of his grad school friends), toiling away as an underpaid high school chemistry teacher, knowing that his own son Walt Jr. loved him but thought Uncle Hank, the DEA Agent, was a much cooler role model and suffering through the shock of a surprise cancer diagnosis, he slowly sheds his timid milquetoast personality to become Heisenberg. One of the interesting questions that Better Call Saul inherently posits, in its exploration of Jimmy McGill's transformation into Saul Goodman, is the question of "Can anyone ever really change their nature?" Was Jimmy always secretly Saul, with Kim as the only potent antidote? And as the events of Better Call Saul , as a prequel, recontextualize the story of Breaking Bad , we are left to wonder this as well about Walt. Does Walt really transform into the murderous, greedy, reckless Heisenberg? Or was Heisenberg always there and just got more and more loose as he got away with making more and more money and gaining more and more power in the drug trafficking world? His manipulative behavior knew no bounds - he poisoned Brock, Andrea's son, to get Jesse on his side to follow through with the plan to assist Hector in killing Gus (by convincing Jesse that Gus was responsible for the poisoning). He poisoned a child! Walter White, the devoted father to Walt Jr and Holly, poisoned a child! Yes, Brock pulled through, but seriously. What a monster. Can anyone ever really change their nature? Did Walt change? Or did he just remove the gasket and unleash the Heisenberg lurking within? "I did it for me," he admits. Maybe Heisenberg was his true nature. Bryan Cranston came into Breaking Bad mostly known for playing Malcolm’s dad on Malcolm in the Middle , but his performance as Walter White showed a huge depth and range of acting ability and won him three Emmys. He has since received an Oscar nomination as well. However, as a card-carrying Seinfeld superfan, I have to admit that in my heart, he will always be Tim Whatley, DDS to me. Don’t be an anti-dentite, folks. 1. Eduardo "Lalo" Salamanca I thought Gus was the best villain in the Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul universe, and then, during Better Call Saul 's fourth season, we are introduced to Lalo Salamanca, whose brand of villainy is so truly insane, who is a true bombastic agent of extreme chaos, and who is extremely, disconcertingly, charming (and, it has to be said, incredibly sexy), that it completely upended my entire viewing experience. I'd have a drink with Lalo. I'd have a few. He's great! He's everyone's friend! But he'll also kill random people who get in his way with no qualms about it (even Hector doesn't murder randos at whim)! He's a legitimate sociopath, but he's also... so much fun? He loves to cook! He's tenacious! He does his research! He's also ruthless! He forces Saul (and Mike) to hike through the Mexican desert for days picking up $7 million in bail money! He travels to Germany just to talk to Werner Ziegler's widow to try and suss out what Gus is up to with the underground meth lab construction project! He was so charming that she almost invited him into her house for a nightcap (and maybe some torrid sex and who could blame her goddamn just look at the man )! He hides in sewers for days scoping out Gus' superlab site under the laundromat! He plans ahead for any contingency - even one in which he would need to fake his own goddamn death! This man takes "evil genius" to a whole new level. Lalo had to be written to account for a continuity error between Better Call Saul ’s cartel storyline and Saul Goodman's original introduction during the run of Breaking Bad - when Walt and Jesse have him in the desert with a bag over his head, he asks if "Lalo [sent them]", which was never explained or followed up on afterward during the rest of the tale of Walter White. So, here comes Lalo... and then Lalo becomes not just the best fucking villain, but the best fucking character on the whole damn show. Seriously, I gotta say, how is it possible that fairly late in Better Call Saul 's run, after all of the mess with Jimmy's bar hearing and Chuck's death has been dealt with, we are handed someone like Lalo? The audacity of creator and showrunners Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould to present us with a villain THIS good after so much brilliant writing over the course of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul ... my god. And to give us this man with us FULLY KNOWING that he does not survive because he isn't in Breaking Bad ... it's almost criminal. I've been talking about how we're gonna get to something later throughout this whole listicle, and here we are. It's Lalo. Lalo is everything. All roads lead to Lalo. Lalo is the one who is betrayed by Nacho (who let Gus' assassins into his house to murder Lalo’s house staff and seriously wound him), leading not just to Nacho's eventual self-sacrifice but also Lalo faking his own death and then returning to figure out how to extract revenge from Gus, whom he knows was behind the attack. Lalo lets Hector (and only Hector) know that he is still alive. Gus has a sense that Lalo is still alive and goes to extreme measures to protect himself. Mike tells Kim that it is believed that Lalo is still alive, but Kim doesn't tell Jimmy because she's afraid he'll call off the Howard scam out of fear, and as she was putting it, "[she was] having too much fun!" ("I did it for me.") And her choice to not tell Jimmy that Lalo was still out there directly resulted in Howard Hamlin's death. Howard comes to their apartment to confront them about their attempts to discredit him in the law community, and their initial attempts to blow him off eventually turn into palpable fear as they try to convince Howard to get the hell out of there, because Lalo comes strolling through the door Howard left open, holding a gun with a silencer. And even at this moment - confronting the two people who have spread a rumor that he is an addict and an irresponsible attorney - Howard senses the danger and starts trying to talk Lalo down (not even knowing who he is!)... and is met with a bullet to the temple. Brutal. Absolutely brutal. Let me tell you something, folks, I have watched a lot of television in my day and I have never before had such a visceral, physical reaction to anything on TV the way I did when Lalo murdered Howard. I gasped. My whole body shook. I had to pause the playback for a second to get myself together. Poor Howard. Wrong place, wrong time. (And I guess he hadn't heard the rumors at the courthouse about Jimmy being a "friend to the cartel"?) Better Call Saul had been, up till this point, running on two parallel tracks - the lawyer plotline and the cartel plotline, connected only by Mike and Jimmy's association. Howard's death brought these two stories together finally and set the stage for Saul Goodman to grow into being and also put the wheels in motion for the human catastrophe that is Walter White. In the end, as we know, Lalo had to die (because he's not in Breaking Bad ), and Gus gets the best of him in a confrontation at the still-incomplete superlab. And then, the haunting conclusion to this whole messy saga: Mike directing Gus' henchmen to bury both Lalo and Howard's bodies in the foundation of the superlab. Talk about a recontextualization of Breaking Bad . All those years later, all that time Walter and Jesse spent in that superlab manufacturing the blue meth for Gus, and they had no idea that just under their feet, underneath the red floors, were those two bodies - both of them direct and indirect casualties of their lawyer’s actions. Whew. That's some heavy shit right there. Tony Dalton plays Lalo Salamanca and holy moly I am now going to go seek out anything and everything this man has ever been in because what a mind-blowing tour de force was his performance on Better Call Saul . How is it possible to play a raging murderous sociopath in a way that makes you want to hang out with him ? It’s absolutely wild. Give him all the Emmys too. All of them. ALL. OF. THEM. And Tony, I’ll buy you a beer anytime. Or three. It’s on me. Give me a call. S’all good, man. Reeya Banerjee Staff Writer Reeya is a musician and writer based in NY's Capital District. Her debut album The Way Up was released on January 27, 2022. She can frequently be seen in her car on the NYS Thruway cursing traffic on her way to the Hudson Valley for band rehearsals or to Brooklyn for recording sessions. In her other life, she works as a staff accountant for a management company that oversees veterinary practices nationwide, enjoys watching Law & Order SVU returns while eating gummy bears, and has a film degree from Vassar College that she does not use.

The evolution of a celebrated funny man to an acclaimed dramatic actor The term Renaissance Man technically means someone who is very good at many things. Taken literally, the word “renaissance” in French means rebirth - so a man who is reborn, or reinvented. After Steve Carell’s latest turn in FX’s drama miniseries The Patient (available to stream in full on Hulu after its season finale on Tuesday, October 25), it seems clear to me that either definition applies to him. Or both. In The Patient , Carell plays Dr. Alan Strauss, a therapist who is taken hostage by his patient Sam (Domhnall Gleeson, in a wonderful performance walking the line between bizarrely deadpan and frightening rage), a serial killer who desperately wants to stop killing people and wants to receive treatment to curb his murderous urges. Knowing that if he discloses that he literally kills people in session with Alan in his office Alan will be legally obligated to report him, Sam drugs Alan and chains him to a post in the basement of his mother’s house, where he lives, so that he can have 24/7 access to therapy in a way that ensures that he will not be apprehended by law enforcement. Despite this not at all resembling the way the therapeutic process works, Alan is forced to attempt to help Sam, knowing that if he doesn’t, he will likely become one of Sam’s victims, again to protect against being arrested and jailed. Along the way, Alan, given plenty of time to think while Sam goes to work in between forced therapy sessions, reflects on the recent passing of his wife Beth, who was the cantor at their family synagogue (where Reform or “Liberal” Judaism was practiced), and his strained relationship with his son Ezra, who converted to Orthodox Judaism and clashed with his family on what constituted the true practice of Judaism. He also, due to the stress of his situation in captivity (especially after Sam commits two more murders while Alan is working with him), begins to disassociate, leading to him having his own therapy “sessions” in his mind with his former therapist and mentor Charlie (played with lovely nuance by David Alan Grier), who helps him sort through various strategies for reaching Sam and also processing his grief about losing his wife and his anger at the way Ezra so callously rejected everything he and Beth believed in. He also begins to explore facets of his own relationship to Judaism while contemplating his potential death (perhaps unavoidable given the specter of the Holocaust). The Patient is a slow burn, even in the earlier, shorter episodes (Episode 1 clocks in at a slim 21 minutes). I am reluctant to divulge Alan’s or Sam’s eventual fates, as this show is well worth watching, but I will say that Alan’s journey in captivity allows him to find a measure of peace both with his grief over Beth’s passing and in finding empathy towards Ezra’s choices instead of the rage he carried for so many years - mimicking his attempts at steering Sam towards developing a sense of empathy in order to stop murdering people he feels have wronged him – and it’s a beautiful journey to witness. Steve Carell gives a very affecting performance as Alan Strauss, and while it is a bit problematic to cast him as a Jewish character given his lack-of-Jewishness (Carell was raised Roman Catholic), he manages to inhabit the role fully to a point where after a while I stopped noticing the anachronistic casting. He embodies Alan’s sensitive and gentle nature in a way that clearly shows what a talented therapist he is, and his scenes with David Alan Grier allow for a bit of gallows humor so we can see that Alan isn’t just a purely kind pushover. The moments especially when he comes to understand more fully the nature of his grief over losing his wife to cancer and his complicated grief over ”losing” Ezra to Orthodox Judaism are especially moving, and showcase just how gifted Carell has become in playing dramatic roles. I fully expect him to receive an Emmy nomination for The Patient next year. And that’s the thing - that Carell might be, at this point, more known for his dramatic performances than for his comedic ones. It’s honestly not what I expected from him when I first became aware of him on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart , where he frequently was paired with his old friend Stephen Colbert from the very short-lived Dana Carvey sketch series - which I wrote about for Story Screen some years ago - in a point-counterpoint segment called “Even Stephven” where they always ended up yelling unintelligibly at each other. Colbert and Carell also ended up voicing Ace and Gary, the heroes of Robert Smigel’s Ambiguously Gay Duo cartoon shorts on SNL in the late 90s/early aughts. It’s certainly not what I expected from a man whose breakout film role was the eponymous 40 Year Old Virgin . And it’s a huge surprise after six seasons of playing the hapless Michael Scott, inept and frequent foot-in-mouth Manager of the Dunder-Mifflin Scranton branch in the American version of The Office (where he turned the uncomfortable yet quintessentially British cringe humor of Ricky Gervais’ portrayal of the equivalent character David Brent into someone with a bit more sweetness and humanity). Post Daily Show , Carell’s first significant film role was as weatherman Brick Tamland in 2004’s Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy . Judd Apatow was so impressed by his performance that he approached Carell to work on a film together, which is what led to the blockbuster 40 Year Old Virgin in 2005, officially establishing him as a leading man. He moved on to play other comedic roles such as Uncle Arthur (a role originated by Paul Lynde) in the film adaptation of Bewitched , Maxwell Smart (a role originated by Don Adams) in the film adaptation of Get Smart , and the main character Gru in the Despicable Me franchise, among others. Along the way, he was cast and shot to television infamy as the aforementioned Michael Scott on The Office . Carell’s first foray into less overt comedy was his role in 2006’s Little Miss Sunshine as Frank, Abigail Breslin’s gay suicidal uncle who the family invites into their home to care for. While overall Little Miss Sunshine is a comedy, the humor tends towards the dark, and Uncle Frank’s character arc in particular is imbued with deep sadness and was an indication that he might be capable of stretching beyond the broad bombastic humor of his onscreen performances to date. After leaving The Office , Carell was cast in the true crime drama film Foxcatcher , also starring Mark Ruffalo and Channing Tatum - Carell played millionaire and eventually convicted murderer John Eluthere du Pont. This film is a very uncomfortable watch - mostly because Du Pont was a very strange man - and it’s tempting to laugh at Carell’s performance at first mostly because of the very large prosthetic nose he had to wear in order to portray Du Pont, and his awkward mannerisms and stilted speaking cadence. Once you get past the obvious oddities, though, it’s clear that Carell was extremely comfortable handling himself in a dramatic role, and it garnered him an Oscar nomination. Since then, he seems to have flipped very quickly and seamlessly into becoming a serious dramatic film actor, with roles in The Big Short and Battle of the Sexes . In 2018 he carried the film adaptation of journalist David Sheff’s memoir Beautiful Boy playing Sheff alongside Timothee Chalamet as his son Nic struggled with drug addiction, for which he received immense critical acclaim. This film is absolutely harrowing to watch, but the father-son chemistry between Chalamet and Carell is very believable, and Carell’s performance is heartbreaking. He subsequently played Donald Rumsfeld in Adam McCay’s political satire comedy-drama Vice about the life of Dick Cheney (played by Christian Bale). This film wasn’t as well received as Beautiful Boy but Carell again received praise for his performance. Carell returned to television in 2019 to star on Apple TV’s drama The Morning Show with Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston, playing Mitch Kessler, a morning show news anchor who is fired due to a sexual misconduct accusation, for which he was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series. Which ends up looping me back to The Patient . Carell is 60 years old now (the mind boggles, especially when I revisit old clips of him in his early 30s on the Dana Carvey Show ). His salt and pepper hair and beard and calm yet assertive speaking voice lend him a level of gravitas that was hard to fathom when watching him bumble around as Michael Scott, and given that The Patient is essentially a two-hander with him and Gleeson (and Grier, for the dissociation scenes), he is absolutely riveting to watch, holding his own with both actors (who are exceptional in their own distinctive ways, as his presence grounds every moment he is on screen. You can’t take your eyes off him. There are moments in The Patient (and I noticed this in Beautiful Boy , too) when he raises his voice to shout and in my mind, I can hear echoes of him screaming at Stephen Colbert on The Daily Show or howling “KELLY CLARKSON!” in pain during the infamous chest-waxing scene in The 40 Year Old Virgin , and occasionally it will take me out of the moment and remind me that I’m watching Steve Carell, Noted Funny Man. But these brief flashes of memory of his lighter fare aren’t bad, per se. As an Old Millennial, I basically grew up watching Steve Carell, and as I experience my own transformations as I age, I have nothing but admiration for Carell as an actor, to be able to be so fully versatile that he can disappear into a role like David Sheff or Alan Strauss and carry a dramatic film or show so capably after so many years as a comedian. The small reminders of how far he has come as a performer I get when I hear that familiar yelling timbre in his voice make me smile. Is it weird to say I’m proud of Steve Carell? Maybe it is, but no matter, I am proud of him and I can’t wait to see what he does next. Reeya Banerjee Staff Writer Reeya is a musician and writer based in NY's Capital District. Her debut album The Way Up was released on January 27, 2022. She can frequently be seen in her car on the NYS Thruway cursing traffic on her way to the Hudson Valley for band rehearsals or to Brooklyn for recording sessions. In her other life, she works as a staff accountant for a management company that oversees veterinary practices nationwide, enjoys watching Law & Order SVU returns while eating gummy bears, and has a film degree from Vassar College that she does not use.

A Review of the UK Channel 5/PBS Masterpiece Show All Creatures Great & Small I grew up with dogs. I like dogs. I like all animals. Hell, I like animals more than I like most people. So when I was about 7 or 8 years old, my mom gave me a copy of James Herriot's Dog Stories , a collection of memoir pieces written by a veterinary surgeon who practiced for nearly 50 years in the Yorkshire Dales. I was enraptured by the stories - charming and entertaining accounts of small-town living (with the bonus of ALL DOGS ALL THE TIME) - and read and re-read the book several times over the next ten years before I, unfortunately, misplaced it at some point during a move. (It is a strange turn of events that 30 years after reading and falling in love with these stories I have come to work in the finance department of a medical group that manages veterinary practices nationwide.) I later came to know that James Herriot was the pen name of a veterinarian named James Alfred Wight, and he had written a series of eight memoirs set in the 1930s-1950s about his experiences with veterinary practice, animals, and their owners, published in the United Kingdom starting with If Only They Could Talk in 1970. Later on, when the books were scheduled for publication in the United States, the first six books in the series were considered too short to publish independently, so they were combined in pairs to create three volumes, followed by the last two original books. After that, publishers in the US pulled stories from all of the books to create compilation volumes, of which Dog Stories was one (there is also a Cat Stories book and a Yorkshire Stories book, among others). The most famous book of the US publications is All Creatures Great and Small, but overall the entire franchise based on Wight’s writing was very successful, leading to several television and film adaptations of his books, including the film All Creatures Great & Small , released in 1975, a BBC television series of the same name that debuted in 1978 and ran for 90 episodes, and most recently, a UK Channel 5 television series that debuted in 2020 and has been airing in the US on PBS on January 10, 2021, as a part of Masterpiece . This last series in particular is what I am going to focus on here because it dropped on PBS at EXACTLY the right time for me and my boyfriend. After the relentless stress of the COVID lockdown, the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol (and losing my aunt to COVID on the same day), we were really in need of some gentle fare. This latest adaptation of All Creatures Great & Small is, quite simply, a lovely show about nice people who do nice things and care about each other, and it was and is a soothing balm amidst the general horror of the world these days. The show begins in 1937 with James Herriot (Nicholas Ralph), a newly qualified vet, moving from his family's home in Glasgow to accept a job in Darrowby (a small town in the Yorkshire Dales) at a vet practice in Skeldale House owned and operated by Siegfried Farnon (Samuel West). Living at Skeldale house along with James and Siegfried is Siegfried’s younger brother Tristan (Callum Woodhouse), who was raised by Siegfried after the death of their parents and is training to be a vet as well (while also being a bit of a hot mess), and their housekeeper, Mrs Audrey Hall (Anna Madeley). Eventually, Helen Alderson (Rachel Shenton), a local farmer's daughter, moves into Skeldale House after falling in love and marrying James. All Creatures Great & Small is your basic workplace dramedy, with the oft-seen trope of work friends turning into a chosen family (especially given that all of the key players live at Skeldale House). Every episode usually features an overarching plotline about a major farm animal health situation in the farming communities of the Yorkshire Dales (usually handled by James or Siegfried), a smaller plotline about the oddballs who bring their housepets to Skeldale House for checkups and minor ailments (handled by Tristan, who after finally passing his qualifying exams is put in charge of the general surgery at Skeldale), and vignettes about the personal lives of all three vets and Mrs Hall. At times the stakes can feel pretty low - any farm animal-related crisis usually involves James saving the day (or on the occasions when he can't, the farmer handling the bad outcome with no hard feelings), any element of consternation Siegfried feels about the reputation of his practice tempered by his and James' skills (and often wise words from Mrs Hall), any scrape Tristan gets into usually resolved by him slowly learning how to take ownership of his mistakes and grow into a better vet, and any drama with James and Helen's relationship resulting in them having a sensible conversation and figuring out how to be true partners in marriage. If there is a problem in Act 1 of an episode, it is almost always resolved by the end of Act 2. Over time, especially if one were to binge this show (all episodes from seasons 1-3 are available on Amazon Prime Video or through the PBS app if you are a member of your local affiliate), the manufactured drama, wacky hijinks, and always happy endings start to feel so sweet that it will give you a toothache (as my boyfriend says). But ultimately, the real strength of this show is not so much the simplistic plotlines as it is the witty writing, rich character development, and performance of the actors. Additionally, the most recent season (the finale was just aired on February 19, 2023), set in 1939, begins to slowly explore some darker themes. World War 2 is on the horizon, young men are being encouraged to enlist, conscription (England’s version of the draft) is beginning and James has conflicted feelings about being in a protected profession and thus barred from enlisting (public health and safety in farming communities is a direct result of veterinarians' work), and Helen doesn’t want to lose James to the military. Siegfried is triggered by the impending war due to trauma from his experiences in the British Army Veterinary Corps during the first World War, and Mrs. Hall is dealing with the fallout of her strained relationship with her son, who is enlisting, after having her marriage to her husband fall apart due to his returning from the first World War with shell-shock (what has now come to be known as PTSD). The show does retain its fundamental gentle vibes in Season 3, but the specter of violence and death from the looming war in the background allows for more depth and complication in the stories than seen in the prior two seasons. While Nicholas Ralph is indeed very charming as our protagonist James, and his chemistry with Rachel Shenton as Helen is quite sweet, and while Callum Woodhouse as Tristan is extremely endearing in his rakish hot mess way, the MVP of All Creatures Great & Small by far is Samuel West as the eccentric, grumpy, but secretly soft-hearted Siegfried, and the relationship between Siegfried and Mrs Hall is a wonderful depiction of two people who have known and worked and lived together for so long that they have become soulmates - platonic soulmates, but soulmates all the same. The decision by the producers of this version of All Creatures Great & Small to age Mrs Hall down from being the crotchety elderly woman of Wight’s source material to someone warmer and closer to Siegfried's age is a masterful one, allowing for this wonderful relationship to develop, and Anna Madeley is a terrific, wry, no-nonsense foil to West's bombastic weirdness. (There is a not-insignificant contingent of fans who ship Siegfried and Mrs Hall for this reason; I fully admit I am one of these fans). Bottom line: If you have had your fill of dark television media and are looking for some good old-fashioned heartwarming fun, please check out All Creatures Great & Small . Your spirit will thank you. (And when you're done, hit me up so we can debate whether Siegfried and Mrs Hall should just get married already or not.) Reeya Banerjee Staff Writer Reeya is a musician and writer based in New York's Capital District. Her debut album, "The Way Up," was released on January 27, 2022. She can frequently be seen in her car on the NYS Thruway cursing traffic on her way to the Hudson Valley for band rehearsals or to Brooklyn for recording sessions. In her other life, she works as a staff accountant for a management company that oversees veterinary practices nationwide, enjoys watching Law & Order SVU returns while eating gummy bears, and has a film degree from Vassar College that she does not use.

Throughout his career, Steven Spielberg has created some of the most popular films of all time, garnering him an enormous amount of respect on both a critical and financial scale. He is considered by many to be the most famous director of all time, given his track record as both director and producer of some of the most recognizable films of the past 50 years. Movie Daddy is a series by Story Screen Editor-in-chief, Mike Burdge, which aims to cover the Beard's directorial filmography in an attempt to present just why Steven Spielberg is very much that hot fire when it comes to being an American filmmaker. In this installment, we’re taking a look at the animated side of things, with 2012’s fantastically epic and jaw-droppingly experimental, The Adventures of Tintin (The Secret of the Unicorn, if you’re nasty and/or English). ==================== I’m not the biggest lover of 3D spectacle, but The Adventures of Tintin is a marvelous piece of adventure filmmaking, and one of the few non-Pixar “animated” films released after my youth that I find myself returning to again and again. The world is rich, the story is thrilling, and the skilled technique is on display in every frame. In an age where computer-generated effects seem so commonplace that they can fall short to underwhelming, or be over utilized to the point of distraction, Tintin rides the tightrope between the two with breathtaking ease and success. Spielberg first came into contact with Tintin when reading reviews for Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1983. Unaware of what this word: “Tintin,” meant that people kept using to describe his latest flick, he was eventually turned on to the comics written by Belgian artist Georges Remi, who went by the pen name Herg é . Even though the books were written in French, Stevie was able to understand the story easily, due to his own cinematic language and the brilliance of Herg é ’s artwork. Says Spielberg: "Every frame, every single panel told a story in cinematic terms, including color palette, composition, figures in action, very expressive actions, the way Herg é would pose his characters, almost like he were trying to squeeze out 24 frames in a single frame and succeeding. And that was what I think is the genius of Herg é : It was a movie." Spielberg was immediately committed to bringing the world of Tintin and his fluffy dog, Snowy, to the big screen. Luckily for him, the new Herg é fan also happened to be the recipient of equal admiration from Herg é himself, who was so delighted in the director’s interest in his work that he proclaimed Spielberg was: “the only person who could ever do Tintin justice.” The two were set to meet and discuss the plans for bringing Tintin and the rest of Herg é ’s creations to life, but that same week the artist passed away suddenly due to cardiac arrest connected with complications to a rare bone marrow blood cancer. Herg é ’s widow, Fanny Rodwell, continued supporting the director’s dream of adapting Tintin , but after a few failed attempts to crack the script, Spielberg became distracted with his many, many projects throughout the 80s and 90s, and eventually the rights were returned to the Herg é Foundation. After a very close call involving (*thunder strike*) Roman Polanski potentially adapting the material himself, the rights were returned to The Beard in 2001, where he started having the script properly fleshed out by Steven Moffat, eventually landing it in the laps of Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish to be finished up. At the same time, Spielberg had been pulled away from his original live-action-mixed-with-animation concept. Peter Jackson, who Spielberg had contacted about developing the technology to create a computer-generated Snowy, insisted the film be motion capture (at 0:54) , with all of the new advances in the medium, that he had helped develop over his years working on the Lord of the Rings films and King Kong . Brief side note: throughout this piece, I will repeatedly recommend: let Joe Cornish write and direct a Tintin sequel (should you just so happen to be in some position where this would be considered a reasonable request). The power couple of Jackson and Spielberg allowed for Jackson’s childhood love of Tintin, and Spielberg’s American sensibilities, (and not really growing up with the comics) to create something extremely approachable and original. Everyone could enjoy the final product. And the added medium of motion capture opened up a world of possibilities for Spielberg to attempt to not only honor Herg é ’s style, but also his flair for epic and exciting visuals. But it wasn’t without its hurdles for the director - who himself had never worked with the technology that seemed to be changing virtually everyday. Said Spielberg: "The performance capture medium requires a little more projection of one’s feelings. The performance has to be not forced but extended a little stronger than normal. Not that subtleties don’t exactly read, but if you’re too internal nothing is going to appear, you need to demonstrate how you’re feeling instead of just feeling how you’re feeling." (This is actually how Spielberg makes ALL of his movies pop: the over exaggeration of tone and feeling.) Spielberg didn’t let the new medium change his style of shooting. Shots were set up and marked out just as you would on a live action set, and Spielberg programmed the camera placement and angles himself. There’s an unbelievable level of craft on display throughout Tintin’s 107 minute runtime, not only in the bombastic action-filled set pieces, but even more so in the quieter moments Wright and Cornish have created to flesh out these larger than life characters. Spielberg has a tendency to garnish his movies with big characters with big personalities, (think Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park or Amon Goeth in Schindler’s List ) and he always finds a way to make these lavish personas make sense in the world he’s constructed, by grounding them with relatable personalities and struggles, whether it’s “daddy issues” or inferiority complexes. And he doesn’t let Tintin’s fabulous goings-ons completely overshadow the prime story he is trying to tell. As Spielberg put it, “The medium is not the message. The characters and the story are.” Just let Joe Cornish write and direct a Tintin sequel, already. When it comes to appreciating the movie separately from the amount of effort and skill that went into making it, there’s really nothing like it to compare to fairly. Aesthetically, the film firmly balances somewhere between live-action and animation, without too much of a foot in either world, breaking through the “uncanny valley” by embellishing its characters with cartoonish designs and having them react to a seemingly normal world as a comic book character would. There’s almost a subversive thrill that grabs you and won’t let go from the moment the action first starts up, and again, this is as much in the quieter moments of exposition and character development as it is in the larger, wild rollercoaster ride of stimulating eye-candy. While the movie is inarguably titled, The Adventures of Tintin , this is very much Haddock’s story, the bumbling sea captain turned accident-prone ward to our deadline-free child journalist. Andy Serkis, who kicked digital character work’s ass as Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies, as well as the titular ape in King Kong , plays Haddock with so much verve and nuance it’s hard to remember that there’s a spindly chap in a body sized sock behind all of the mannerisms and catch-phrases. Haddock’s character is given the primary arc throughout the film’s story, changing in ways you would typically see in your main protagonist. Tintin himself acts more as a propellor for the adventure being told, especially in the film’s first quarter, before the arrival of Haddock. He then operates almost solely as a living rising action, meant only to sometimes, (literally) drag Haddock into the events that will reshape who he is and how he acts. I don’t think this is a failure of Tintin’s character as written, but a triumph of subverting what we expect from these types of big blockbuster animated films. Of course, I’d never stop punching myself if I didn’t briefly bring up the Indiana Jones comparisons. While I’ll be doing separate pieces on those individual films (so exciting!) Tintin , or at least what Spielberg brings to his version of it, obviously owes so much to the rugged archaeologist with the hat and whip. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull aside (this is the way), the Indiana Jones franchise is not only a fantastic ride from Raiders to Last Crusade , but it really feels like Spielberg had an endless amount of concepts and tropes at the time, that he could utilize again and again, always producing a fantastic film, but never really repeating himself too much throughout the trilogy. Each installment of the Indiana Jones movies feels fresh and of its own contained story and themes, a technique lifted straight from one of its largest inspirations: the James Bond movies. I’ve spoken before on how one of Spielberg’s greatest gifts is his ability to redistribute aspects of other films and genres into whatever he has in front him, allowing the director to create a wholly original experience out of seemingly niche tropes. This is no different with Tintin . Spielberg’s cameras are let loose in a virtual world where gravity and logic no longer hinder The Beard; his energy and imagination are released into an open animated world with seemingly no limit or restrictions. The possibilities are endless, and he takes every advantage of them at every turn. The few “Spielberg Oners” are just mesmerizing, and a marvel to behold every time you experience them. Most specifically, the chase following Snowy, earlier on in the film, from the recently bullet-ridden front door of Tintin’s apartment foyer through the streets of the Belgian city. Once it starts, my brain has a good amount of trouble keeping up with every breaking pot falling from a balcony and all of the tires screeching, as our fluffy, cartoon canine narrowly escapes death. It’s a pleasure to see, and honestly, it gets better every time you experience it. Let Joe Cornish write and direct a Tintin sequel. That’s really what my thoughts on this whole movie boil down to: it’s an experience unlike any other. For every Indiana Jones movie, we’ve also got a Romancing the Stone or The Mummy (1999). Sure, you get a couple of Godfathers , but you’ve also got Goodfellas, and even a Casino, right around the corner. These are all capital-G Great movies, (yes, even The Mummy , you undeserving monster) but they are inevitably overshadowed by the influence they’ve had on the greater filmmaking world, especially in the realm of similar genre. But even with almost a full decade between now and the release of The Adventures of Tintin , we’ve yet to see a film live up to the promise the original gave us. No movie, animated or live action, has since propelled itself so effortlessly into a fantastically new world, one which works by its own rules and exhilarates audiences with its originality and scope. (Let. Joe. Cornish. Write. And. Direct. A. Tintin . Sequel. Please.) The Adventures of Tintin is an amazing blip on Spielberg’s filmography radar, made even more obscure by the fact that it was released not only in the same year as another Spileberg film, (which he tends to do every now and then) but in the same WEEK. War Horse was released in theaters on December 25th, just 4 days after Tintin’s inexplicable Christmas release. (This is a summer movie if you’ve ever seen one, right?) In hindsight, you can see that the two film’s separate box offices seem to suggest that they cannibalized each other’s success, brandishing a mere opening weekend of $7 million and $9 million, respectively. While Tintin would go on to gross nearly $374 million compared to its budget of $135 million, the studios eventually gave up on following up with a sequel (set to be directed by Jackson this time around, with Spielberg swapping chairs to be a producer). And thus, the motion picture journeys of Tintin, Haddock and Snowy, were cut short. But the best part of the motion capture style used in the film is that these characters can be brought back at any time, looking and sounding just like they did in the original, only now with improved graphics design, and by a man named Joe, who would probably leap at the opportunity to quench his thirst for one more adventure. On the next Movie Daddy , we’re gonna deck the halls with the solid, sorta-Christmas flick, Catch Me If You Can . Mike Burdge Editor-in-chief Founder of and programmer for Story Screen. Lover of stories and pizza in the dark. When he isn't watching movies, you can find him reading things about people watching movies. He currently resides in Poughkeepsie, NY and most assuredly is going through a French Connection phase.

Throughout his career, Steven Spielberg has created some of the most popular films of all time, garnering him an enormous amount of respect on both a critical and financial scale. He is considered by many to be the most famous director of all time, given his track record as both director and producer of some of the most recognizable films of the past 50 years. Movie Daddy is a series by Story Screen Editor-in-chief, Mike Burdge, which aims to cover the Beard's directorial filmography in an attempt to present just why Steven Spielberg is very much that hot fire when it comes to being an American filmmaker. In this installment, we’re taking a good ol’ hindsight look at Spielberg’s second attempt at awards legitimacy, Empire of the Sun . ==================== In the late 80s, Steven Spielberg began to broaden his approach to which types of projects he was signing on to do. The outlook of his career up to this point was one of inarguable legitimacy: he was an insanely successful director, overflowing with blockbuster cred, whose name was already being placed above movie titles for marketing. You would be just as compelled to catch the latest Spielberg joint as many are to watch any of the numerous superhero-extended-universe blockbusters dropping these days. And this should have been enough. And while he has always returned to the fantastical genre-filmmaking that created the nuance around “A Steven Spielberg Film,” he started pretty early on in his career with what we now refer to as "the Serious Spielberg’s." Tucked between his two Indiana Jones sequels, Spielberg attempted awards legitimacy with The Color Purple (1985) and Empire of the Sun (1987). One is a period drama, the other a war film, but both involve a coming-of-age twist that allowed the director’s storytelling strengths to work within these new styles. While I haven’t seen the former (soon…), I can speak to the movie at hand, Empire of the Sun . The things I found most interesting on my recent rewatch of this piece were the staggeringly large amount of techniques that the director would go on to reuse in many of his later, more serious, and well-regarded fare. There’s a lot of Saving Private Ryan in Empire , as well as some of the subtleties - in rough form - that would lead to much of the director’s style in Schindler’s List . But in his early days, subtlety was not Spielberg’s strongest suit, which is why I think the initial reaction to Empire was one of “Eh, alright.” Spielberg’s a dude that relies on grand feeling, universal understanding, and the bombastic, relative want for wonder and need for escape. It should be pointed out early on here, that few do this as well as him. But in Empire , his tendencies to linger on images, and attempts to suggest themes, rather than outright exclaim, whether verbally or physically, come across a tad forced, but never actually seem fully superficial. He means what he is saying, but he hasn’t yet crafted the ability to, (I think) properly execute the task while staying within his stylistic tone, regardless of genre. Again, this is something he would perfect with Schindler’s List , and then come to weaponize in Saving Private Ryan. Empire of the Sun is a reactive film. Spielberg attempts to prove himself on a level other than his showmanship, which I think felt important to him at the time, but one that he might not have been properly prepared to really throw himself into. That being said, the movie is still a delight to watch, and with the hindsight of where his later career would take him, it is an extremely interesting look at a young, talented, and successful filmmaker, hellbent on reaching for something more. My take: Empire of the Sun is a flawed creation, but is nevertheless ambitious, highly underrated, and worthy of a closer look. Before we move on, just what is this movie about? Based on J.G. Ballard’s autobiographical book, it follows a story that takes place during 1941 wartime Shanghai, a chapter of World War II that is usually overlooked, most likely given the, uhh, other really crazy shit going on elsewhere. The book deals with the heavy themes of war and class, which are both included in Spielberg’s film, but not as prominently as the other themes the director has in mind to play with. This is where we come to one of the largest complaints of Empire of the Sun : What’s the point? What message is this story trying to convey? General consensus at its time of release was that the movie was thrilling, yet lacked an overall theme, which is a wild take for me, as the simple theme of loss of innocence is aggressively apparent, and the underlying themes are easy enough to consider and expound upon (which I will in a moment). However, to be fair, I think I get the criticism. Spielberg’s own tactics and passions as a filmmaker can sometimes override a deeper meaning, especially when he’s going for a more subtle, artistic approach to expressing the narrative, which he VERY much is going for in Empire . It’s sort of the dreaded “style over substance” take, which I’ve never really taken to approving of when critiquing films. I’ll hold my monocle to my dreary, left eye while I briefly state that, yes, sometimes a film can be extremely joyful in style and lack substance in ANY thematic way, but rarely have I found it called for to use such a throwaway cliche. It’s usually reserved for viewers too distracted by impressive cinematography and effects (or, alternatively, movies too filled with these things for the viewer to be given the slightest care for anything else) to be bothered with that pesky thing called a metaphor. I’m half kidding here, but yes, I think it’s a little overused and can feel a tad rude. Maybe? Doesn’t really matter. You’ve got your typical war cliches going on here: the horrors of war, seen through the eyes of a child, set upon an odyssey through this historical event, but it’s got a bit more on its mind than just that. While the main theme is obviously the loss of innocence, as detailed by the many, many coming-of-age tropes, it’s also a movie about how war does not define a people, but how it can still confuse and change us. It’s a movie about a boy earnestly attempting to understand how he can one day escape to the sky, whether by plane or by soul, bringing about many of the movie’s comments on the similarities between enlightened religion and worldly experience. This is a movie where many of the characters are treated as wholly unique individuals, yet still represent (as metaphors) their country/culture’s place in WWII (the American’s simply waiting and bartering shady deals, the Japanese eagerly grasping at any type of victory). This is all a lot, no argument, but what a viewer can take away from all of this really depends on how they are approaching the film and letting the film happen to them. For example, there’s a sadness that anyone with half a heart, and the slightest interest in the movie they’re watching, will feel when Jim, our boy hero, confesses to a doctor that he can no longer remember what his mother looks like. Anyone can get what the “point” of this moment is meant to convey. But does it feel "cheesy?" Or sincere and relatable? I’d say that depends on the outlook of the person judging. Leaning back from what I THINK works with this movie, let’s focus on some stuff that sure as shit does. This is Christian Bale’s first performance, with an “Introducing” and everything. Over 4,000 kids auditioned for the role of Jim, and we got a kid that would become one of the most popular award darlings in current times. His performance drives home Spielberg’s main theme: youth dealing with death leading to the death of youth. What’s unique to Bale’s Jim, in relation to other Speilberg child protagonists, is his innate unlikability. The kid is kind of a dipshit, and although he grows and evolves quite well as a character, there's always a fanciful air to him that keeps the audience at arm's length; the Trials of Lord Farquaad, so to speak. There’s a cluelessness to his actions - from ordering a maid to make him biscuits, to telling an extremely sick woman to lie down and play dead, which she ultimately does all too well - that persists throughout the story. In a moment of pure, “Now That’s What I Call Acting,” Jim’s innocence is finally and completely swept away with the arrival of the world’s - and even more specifically, America’s - loss of innocence: the dropping of the atom bomb. After this, Jim is left alone and confused as to what to do next, leading to his childlike belief that he can save everyone; innocence attempting to grasp onto the boy as it suffocates into nothingness. Bale’s child performance here is legend, one of the things Spielberg himself is so well known for. Spielberg always imbues his protagonists with childlike subtleties, from the plucky, dag-nab-it sensibilities of Indiana Jones, to the selfish and ignorant motivations behind Oskar Schindler’s first actions, which end up in a similar place as Jim’s unrealistic “I can bring everyone back” sentiment. So when Spielberg uses actual children as his main characters, which he often does, a lot of his skills crossover, making him great with child actors. As Spielberg himself once said when complimented on his talent with both casting and working with younger actors: “When a director casts the part, his job is now complete.” Spielberg knows what he wants when he sees it. The rest of the film's cast is just a dream and Spielberg again utilizes his innate ability to make the audience empathize with (if not at the very least be interested in) the motivations of each character. You’ve got Joe Pantoliano doing his finely crafted, worn-upon sidekick shtick, Ben Stiller popping in an all-timer “Oh, look who that is!” role, and Miranda Richardson burning up the screen as the unenthused adoptive-mother to Bale’s protagonist. But the true, bright star of this film’s ancillary characters is John Malkovich’s Basie, a character practically pulled from a Dickens novel; he's the Fagin to Jim’s Twist. Basie’s relationship with Jim grows from one of simply progressing the plot while pointing out a few themes (when Basie compliments Jim’s respectful demeanor by saying, “You’ve got nice manners, I appreciate that,” he’s reinforcing the film’s theme on how we can respect one another, even in times of hardship and war), to that of the devilish side, of which future Jim will ultimately choose to walk. Malkovich does his usual balancing of impeccable acting with an almost too on-the-nose performance of giving us exactly what we expect this character to be, and for me, it really works. When Basie is first introduced, we see that he looks similar to the character on the cover of Jim’s comic book, primarily due to him stealing Jim’s own aviators and donning them in a premiere scene that teases the reveal of Malkovich’s full face like a Marvel announcement panel. It’s great stuff that you love to see. While the box office performance of Empire was a dark sight (it only made back $22 million of its $38 million budget), its critical reception is one of massive interest to me. As previously mentioned, the film was met with some harsh criticism regarding lack of themes and message, something I’ve gotten into a bit already, but most interestingly are the change in gears that occurred since the film’s release. Many, like myself, now praise the film for its tenacity, and the ambition of Spielberg to try and break away from his summer blockbuster aesthetics and create something with “true weight.” This is, of course, indicative of the bullshit that can happen upon a risky film’s initial release, one free of hindsight and cemented purely in the “this is how this movie plays now” type of journalistic film criticism. That’s all well and fine, and no one can really be blamed for judging how a movie works at the time of its release as opposed to what the movie becomes long after, but an unfortunate side-effect of Empire’s bad box office performance and lukewarm critical reception is a maligned perception of the movie’s actual worth. To be fair, the film's length, and its relatively somber and simple themes, juxtaposed with Spielberg’s usual huge sets and wild action scenes, can create a sort of mundane feeling in a viewer. I personally find it thrilling that Spielberg continuously shifts gears all throughout this movie, so that you never quite know what to expect, but I can totally understand how this movie would miss the mark with some audiences, even professional critics. "The book was filled with visual references. And that’s the thing that I really responded to: being able to tell this story through the eyes of a child, and to show the child losing all that. Because it’s about the death of childhood, this story is probably quintessentially more about the death of childhood than anything I’ve made, before or after." -Spielberg, on what drew him to the book, and the film's ultimate theme. Spielberg is, even in many dark and dire genres, an optimistic filmmaker and storyteller, especially during his earlier years. In hindsight, it’s apparent that perhaps a few missteps throughout the '00s taught him a certain kind of humility that has helped hone his expressive nature when it comes to some more serious content. There’s not much positivity in Munich , for example. It’s not at all derogatory to think that Spielberg needed to lose a little of his own innocence before tapping into that flair that he is now known for in his more serious flicks and that at the time, such a swerve from what he was known for would be met with a bit of casual shruggery, especially given the negative critical reception to his previous “serious” effort, The Color Purpl e. As Roger Ebert stated, in his surprisingly positive review at the film’s release: “Spielberg allows the airplanes, the sun and the magical yearning to get in his way.” Spielberg’s motives were, unsurprisingly, sincere: “I’ve been looking for a visual narrative - a story that could be told nearly exclusively through visual metaphors and non pretentious symbolism.” This criticism could seem sort of harsh and uncalled for, but I myself have always been of the mindset that to reach for non-pretension is better than to simply mimic the artistry of other successful projects and fail. Being pretentious is faking, and calling others pretentious is dumb and gets no one anything. But aspiring to communicate a new style non-pretentiously is both responsible and probably well-guided. Art requires artificiality, and the execution of something artificial requires a steady hand, in both visuals and tone. Spielberg tries to emulate the great artistic moments of other films, from Bergman to his buddy Coppola but is held back by his own populace approach to every other aspect of filmmaking. It’s a balancing act, one that becomes increasingly detrimental when the weight of success is ever prominent in a director’s mind. There are even moments where dialogue, most likely expository in nature, is removed to allow for a more “artsy” interpretation. For example, when Jim confronts Basie in a muddy stream, he is clearly speaking a line of resentment, or chastising Basie in some way: you can see Bale’s mouth moving as he delivers a line. The dialogue is removed, leaving only Malkovich’s wordless reaction, changing a brute condemnation into a more surreal, emotive moment of understanding between our two “main” characters. This type of post-production editing is not at all uncommon, happening in just about every movie and (especially) TV show you’ve ever seen, but in the context of what Spielberg seems to be going for with this editing choice, it’s easy to see that he wanted to land an emotional moment with a more subversive attitude, as opposed to what was clearly intended when he shot the scene on that day. These types of choices are indicative of the emotional weight of Spielberg’s efforts, and occasionally, they work well as individual pieces, in and of the moment, but not as a whole collective of #feels throughout the narrative. The only real link we have from an emotional arc scene to scene is Bale’s performance, which technically is Spielberg’s doing, but the positive results seem to lean more towards the actions of Bale himself, as a performer, than anything else. But much of Spielberg’s usual technical flair is still on display here, only morphed and honed into something much more, for a lack of a better word, mature. His tracking shots slow, his pushes twist, his color palette is bleak and gray, and his fades result in long moments of emptiness to really thrust home the idea of time passing more vigorously. The opening shot of coffins, being run over by a boat, is one hell of a table-setter, especially for our Bearded Boy. And you can’t get much more Spielbergian than the film’s opening moments: a young boy yawning at a choir performance, being hassled by the nods and gestures of a caretaker from the bleachers, while simultaneously being reprimanded by the snapping of fingers and repeated slamming of palms on a bible by an infuriated pastor. And while we’re just talking up Spielberg’s amazing abilities as a filmmaker (which is what I’m best at), the footprint scene in Jim’s parents' bedroom (watch here, at about 01:15) is more than enough to solidify the film's bonafides in expressing its narrative with a more visually meaningful tone than expositorily. The camera work in the “Pheasant Hunt” scene is also pure Spielberg magic, using angles and blocking to suggest the non-visibility of something that would most assuredly be seen in reality, but we get it, cause the dude is just that good. And, of course, we have Spielberg’s ever-present motif of the relationship we share with our parents, this time using separation in wartime as a metaphor for divorce. Spielberg has a bunch of stuff that he’s really good at, and he’s not going to let some pesky thing like being “a war movie” get in the way of that. And, as always with these pieces, here are a few leftover notes I had that I think are pretty interesting: When Jamie is riding his bike around his empty house, is this something that David Fincher was referencing in Fight Club or something he just completely ripped off? Riding bikes in places you shouldn't is no unique idea, but these scenes look wildly similar. AFAF. John Williams’ score includes some predictably recognizable fare, while it also includes some heavily mid-80s stylized instrumental arrangements. At times, it sounds like the score to a slasher film’s most tension-raising scenario. Also, his leitmotif of choral arrangements throughout the film is an appreciation that really anchors the film’s tone. The Norman Rockwell painting, “Freedom From Fear,” that Jim hangs on his wall throughout the film holds a motif that is an amazing use of imagery to describe many of the movie’s themes in a single image, from Jim’s admiration of the doctor as a role model, to even the memory of his parents: Empire of the Sun is a good movie, which is something I myself rarely say about a film directed by my boi, but there’s no arguing: there are flaws apparent in the final product. While these flaws, I believe, are due to the filmmaker's youth - being in a bit over his head, trying to reach for something that he believes will ultimately save him - it goes without saying, that he eventually proves good on his promise. Steven Spielberg, as you know, is a king in churning out amazing films, of the same ilk as Empire , many of which have exceeded even the high hopes of his 1987 exploit. One of the most fascinating things about Spielberg is the variety inherent in his filmography. I mean, c’mon, the dude that made Indiana Jones also did that crazy good Abraham Lincoln movie. Oh, this can lead me to my outro: On the next Movie Daddy , we’re gonna take a real good look at what just might be Spielberg’s best movie ever: Raiders of the Lost Ark . Mike Burdge Editor-in-chief Founder of and programmer for Story Screen. Lover of stories and pizza in the dark. When he isn't watching movies, you can find him reading things about people watching movies. He currently resides in Poughkeepsie, NY, and most assuredly is going through a French Connection phase.

Jason Schwartzman is a lot of things. He’s the nephew of director Francis Ford Coppola, cousin of director Sophia Coppola, and original drummer/founding member of the band, Phantom Planet (remember the theme song of The O.C. ?). He writes, he produces, and oh yes, he acts. We at Story Screen want to wish a very happy belated 40th birthday to Jason Schwartzman. And in honor of this treasure of a young man, I wanted to take a look back at some of my favorite Schwartzman performances over the years. Rushmore (1998) - Max Fischer “Take dictation please...” Rushmore - the movie that introduced me to both Jason Schwartzman and Wes Anderson (I saw Bottle Rocket a little later) - really left its mark. It took the common theme of the “coming of age” story and showed us that it really has nothing to do with age most of the time. When I think of Schwartzman, I can’t help but think of Max Fischer; the two are inexplicably intertwined in my mind. Jason’s performance as Max kicked off his acting career. It draws us in, makes us cringe, makes us laugh, and maybe even makes us cry. It doesn’t matter if we have never experienced the hallowed halls of private school like Max; we all have our own Rushmore. I Heart Huckabees (2004) - Albert Markovski “Nobody sits like this rock sits. You rock, rock.” As a character, Albert Markovski vacillates somewhere between Max Fischer and Jack from Darjeeling Limited . He is a young man who is kind of lost in life. He’s passionate about the outdoors (and his poetry), and he holds a deep disdain for Jude Law’s character, Brad: the phony but well-liked executive at Huckabees in I Heart Huckabees. When Albert decides to work with two “existential detectives” (Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman) to figure out what life really all means, they decide to pair him up with his “other,” Tommy Corn (played by Mark Wahlberg). The two serve like a buddy system, helping support each other through their internal struggle to “deconstruct” themselves. Maybe this movie hasn’t aged as well as it did in my memory, but I still love every scene Schwartzman and Wahlberg share together. It’s kind of like finding that one true friend that allows you to be a complete wreck before they help you get your act together. Albert and Tommy egg each other on to do what they really want; they are brothers from other mothers, and I wish we could watch even more scenes of them together. The Darjeeling Limited (2007) - Jack “I love you too, but I’m gonna mace you in the face!” In this Wes Anderson film, Schwartzman plays the youngest of three brothers, Jack. Jack is grieving: both the death of his father, and the end of a recent relationship. His brothers (played by Owen Wilson and Adrien Brody) think Jack’s solution to everything is to run away. He has a tendency to turn his life into fiction. He is constantly trying to read his latest short story to his brothers as a way to communicate. Throughout Darjeeling, Jack repeatedly cues up music on his iPod speaker to create “the mood” (much like Wes Anderson does throughout the soundtracks of his films). And for the entire duration of the movie, he (both Jack and Schwartzman) is completely barefoot. Schwartzman co-wrote the script with Anderson and Roman Coppola, based on their own journey through India. This “spiritual journey” is supposed to reconnect the three estranged brothers after their father’s death. But it is their mother, still living but estranged (played by Angelica Huston) and their several attempts to gain closure, that help them learn to deal with their grief and loss. If Rushmore is about “coming of age,” then Darjeeling is about letting go of your baggage. Literally. Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) - Ash “I weigh less than a slice of bread.” I love Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, and I was already pretty ecstatic when I found out Wes Anderson was creating a stop motion picture based on this popular children’s book. The source material is fairly short. Much of the film’s plot and characters are either creative extrapolation or completely brand new. While the book does mention Mr. Fox’s children, we do not get a lot of backstory on them. In the film, Mr. Fox’s son is the character of Ash, voiced by Schwartzman, and he is one of my favorite characters, period. He is constantly trying to gain his father’s approval and respect. Ash initially sees his cousin, Kristofferson, as a rival. But in the end, he learns his lesson and they become friends. I think we have all been Ash at one point in our lives: trying to live up to someone else’s precedent, a little small for our age, a little angry, and prone to wearing a cape. Hotbox! Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) - Gideon Graves “You made me swallow my gum.” Ahhh, and last but not least, Gideon Graves. THE evil ex of Ramona in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. With Gideon, I imagine Schwartzman was playing a Hollywood caricature of himself (at least that’s what I like to think). Gideon is a smooth-operator: he’s kind of nice, but you don’t actually like him. Or trust him for that matter. And his sideburns are incredible. In the end, it’s awesome to watch him and Scott (Michael Cera) duke it out with swords blazing. Diana DiMuro Associate Editor Besides watching TV and movies, Diana likes the great outdoors, drawing and reading comics, and just generally rocking out. She has a BA in English Literature and is an art school drop out. You can follow her on Instagram @dldimuro

Mike Burdge, Bernadette Gorman-White, Diana DiMuro and Robby Anderson discuss their hopes and predictions for the winners of the 95th Oscars. From Austin Butler being cursed to forever say "Mama" to the animated short that drove all of them insane, it's an episode to remember that slaps in the good way. Listen on....

It's here. The one you've all been waiting for! On this episode of The Pattinson Stuff, Bernadette Gorman-White and Mike Burdge brave the cold chill of Forks, Washington, watching all 5 Twilight movies in their continued quest through the filmography of Robert "Eddie Cullen" Pattinson. The takes are spicy, the bits are plenty and holy hell is BDP2 a wild lil "movie." Listen on....

A review of Lockwood & Co. Season 1 “It’s terrible the world’s come to this. I feel sorry for your generation.” - Lockwood & Co. Based on the popular YA book series by Jonathan Stroud, Lockwood & Co. centers around a version of London where ghosts exist as part of accepted daily life. They are so ever-present in fact that the government has enforced nightly curfews and several agencies have been created to deal with said ghosts before they hurt or kill more people. In this reality, children and teenagers have developed intuitive abilities to see and fight against these ghosts, while adults gradually lose these skills with age. Most agencies are led by an adult supervisor who may or may not have their young employees’ best interests at heart. The only agency to operate without adult supervision is the titular “Lockwood & Co.,” which is comprised of three teenage agents: Anthony Lockwood (Cameron Chapman), Lucy Carlyle (Ruby Stokes), and George Karim (Ali Hadji-Heshmati). Showrunner Joe Cornish is best known for his 2011 film, Attack the Block, starring a young John Boyega, which also concentrated on teenagers taking supernatural matters into their own hands. Along with Cornish, the writing crew on Lockwood includes Kara Smith, Ed Hime, and Joy Wilkinson, who (to give some context for the show's feel) have written episodes for such shows as The Baby, Doctor Who, Skins, and the upcoming Anansi Boys . In 2020, long-time friends and collaborators Cornish, director Edgar Wright and producers Nira Park and Rachael Prior formed a new production company called Complete Fiction. Lockwood & Co. is the first major output from Complete Fiction and I am excited to see what else these friends will produce going forward. Ghost-hunting produces plenty of opportunities for entertaining action sequences throughout the series, especially its sword fights, but the show also displays the Joe Cornish fingerprint of containing great dialogue with loads of humor and biting sarcasm. Well done on the casting here, because there is wonderful chemistry and camaraderie between the show’s leads (Champan, Stokes, and Hadji-Heshmati). Lockwood has the feel of Buffy or Supernatural with the quiet, lived-in environment of the original British Being Human. It also happens to have a great soundtrack. In an interview with RadioTimes.com Joe Cornish explained, "We've gone for some contemporary music but really, a lot of early- to mid-80s goth - Bauhaus, The Cure. Because even though Lockwood & Co. feels like it's set in the present day, it's a parallel reality where the digital revolution never happened." Anthony Lockwood is a rich kid; he is both polished and totally reckless. His competitive nature and desire for the limelight often come at the cost of his own safety. He started an agency to fight ghosts without an adult chaperone, unlike every other paranormal investigation agency out there. He seems to have a little bit of a death wish which may have a bit to do with his dark unexplained youth. He’s an orphan and we never learn exactly how his parents died, only that it happened when he was very young, leaving him the London home that has become the agency’s headquarters. Lockwood presents himself as a bit haunted and older than his years, making his mysterious past that much more intriguing. Chapman does a great job at making Lockwood charming and youthful, yet also dark and extremely problematic. It is for all of these reasons that he sees the talent and potential of the young Lucy Carlyle when she shows up for a job interview with nothing to lose. Lucy is kick ass. It would have been easy to make Anthony Lockwood the star hero with skills to save the day, but it is Lucy who truly shines throughout the series. She left her small village home after realizing that both her mother and her ghost-hunting agency supervisor did not care about her or the other children at risk. After a particularly traumatic job, she lost her best friend who is essentially in a coma known as “ghost locked.” Lucy initially tried to apply for a job with a huge well-funded, well-known London agency, but she was immediately denied for not having finished all of her training qualifications yet. When she sees an advertisement in the paper for Lockwood & Co. she applies as a last resort. Fortunately, Lucy has great talent. She is a “listener” who can hear ghosts just by touching haunted artifacts. Ruby Stokes is both strong and strong-willed as Lucy. She and Lockwood/Chapman have great chemistry. But then again so does she and George/Ali. George is definitely my favorite character. Even though he also possesses ghost hunting “talents,” George's real superpowers are: 1) being highly perceptive and 2) having a voracious love of learning. He is Lockwood & Co.'s researcher extraordinaire, studying ancient languages, mythology, and more. George is the one that often decodes the real mysteries that are going on. He is also a quirky bastard and a great cook. He is the glue that holds the trio together, even while reprimanding them or feeling like a third wheel in the burgeoning relationship between Lucy and Lockwood. George is loveable and looking for love, but each pairing - and all three of the characters together - makes for a truly great Found Family. What I appreciate about Lockwood & Co. most is that the world of the story feels fleshed out. I loved hanging out at the Baker Street apartment in Sherlock, while Holmes and Watson had witty banter with a side of tea. For every action sequence battling ghosts, Lockwood also features scenes where Lucy, George, and Lockwood are just gathered around the kitchen table, processing the mysteries at hand, along with their own trauma. Lockwood also goes to lengths to display the repercussions of what happens when Lockwood and Lucy accidentally burn down a client’s house while fighting a ghost. Their agency gets sued by their client to pay sixty thousand pounds in damages or else they will lose their license and be shut down by the governmental agency that monitors them. The heroes even get arrested at one point. There are actual consequences to their actions, unlike many other fantasy and sci-fi shows where the protagonists make it out unscathed. While there certainly were enough questions left open to make me excited for a potential season two, I am happy to return to the world of Lockwood & Co. just for its witty dialogue and engrossing character relationships. I want to see what this trio gets up to around the breakfast table just as much as their next supernatural job assignment. Diana DiMuro Associate Editor Besides watching TV and movies, Diana likes plants, the great outdoors, drawing and reading comics, and just generally rocking out. She has a BA in English Literature and is an art school dropout. You can follow her on Instagram @dldimuro and Twitter @DianaDiMuro