The Age Of Reason
The blessed event has arrived! Paz has brought forth a child into the world. And it’s Hugh Grant’s! Paz will make an excellent mother and one day will insist her daughter, who has Michael Pitt’s eyes, is no It Girl.
If the above paragraph is too much pop incest 4 U, you may want to get another show. Boardwalk Empire has turned into a surprise holodeck of references that transcends the time difference. That it’s acquiring its own range of viral personality is just irony; all those surprisingly good Richard Harrow costumes are straight out of Descartes.
After another season or so it’ll be real interesting to see if BE begins to autocannibalize. There’s still not a lot of story! It’s just a string of themes and forms that shine and reflect off each other. This is no indictment of the show’s quality, just of how hard it is to pin down.
Dominic Chianese was on the program again this week, w/ actual lines! Did you know Martin Van Buren was of Dutch descent (but was not an Afrikaaner), led the country during a recession (but was not born in Kenya), and was beaten in his reelection campaign by the Afghan Whigs? I wonder if Herman Cain watches this show when he’s not back & forth between Fox News and the Wikipedia channel.
Margaret has decided Nucky is watching too much porn; that NYMag piece from last winter is blowing minds back in time now. Blow Minds, Not Loads would be an excellent tagline for HBO if it weren’t completely not what HBO is about. Still, if you’ve never seen a man hit in the erection by a thrown green lace-up shoe, call your cable provider.
Margaret has also decided she rather fancies the smarmy Irish manservant. Call it the Furio Dilemma. Nucky better stay away from helicopters.
These showrunners and their religious guilt. David Chase laundered his through the umbrage of Tony Soprano. Matthew Weiner, a Jew, was so in denial about his that he cast Colin Hanks as a guitar-playing priest. Terence Winter is a lawyer of no Googleable denomination, I don’t know what his problem is. But as Boardwalk Empire digs itself deeper into Catholic debt, all the Irish poisons amok, we may find out. Wiener and Winter are Chase surrogates with the same manic obsessive recesses. The Sopranos lives forever in both of them, and in both shows. Boardwalk Empire has a little farther to go, but season two is already way dark with the kind of nicked faith Graham Greene kept in Mason jars.
“He loves the Lord, sir” Nelson Van Alden asserts as to why that poor english patient won’t die. He goes on to spout that thing about prayed-for patients faring better than non-, but we know Nelson’s faith is a con, a cover-up for the part of him that wants to decapitate water-closet taggers and treat his wife like a third-world country and fuck girls like Paz de la Huerta. We believe in you, Nelson, but only cause your chin is so chuckable. You, too, have a little farther to go.
