[9.0/10] The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel already answered the question in some ways. How far would Susie go for Midge? How much will she push to break through those “brick walls” (or glass ceilings)? Is it just business between them, or is there something deeper, more personal that merits going further than she would for anyone else?
The answer came, in so many ways, in “The Testi-rostial”. But it doesn’t hurt to see it again in the present. Midge and Susie have tried everything they can to get Midge booked on The Gordon Ford show. Midge nudged Danny Stevens in such a novel yet funny direction that he tried to poach her. Susie staged a coup to get Mike the producer slot. Here, Midge even pens a sketch for Princess Margaret herself that is tasteful but funny, and absolutely kills in a must-win night for the creative team. And it’s still not enough.
So she makes the titular “plea” to Susie -- use your history with Gordon Ford’s wife, Hedy to get me on the show. Midge doesn’t know what she’s asking exactly. She knows it’s an end run around the gatekeepers who would hold her back from stardom. But she doesn’t understand why this is such a big ask for Susie, and in her defense, Susie doesn’t explain and doesn’t want to explain.
In the end, though, she acquiesces. Susie goes to Hedy and asks her to convince Gordon to jettison his rule and book Midge. She talks to the person she least wants to speak to in the world, someone who hurt her, someone she absolutely does not want to owe anything to, let alone ask for a personal favor from. Hedy herself acknowledges how hard this must be for “Susan.” And by god, the last thing Susie wants is the indignity of having to brook Hedy’s suspicions that her relationship with Midge is something more than professional.
But she does it anyway, because it is more than professional, though not in the way Hedy might think. Susie loves Midge. She wants to support Midge. She wants to break down those barriers together. This is her way of expressing it, in doing something much harder than “hopping over dicks” or haranguing talent bookers. It is, more than fixing Midge’s future Hawaiian wedding, the ultimate sign that when push comes to shove, Susie would do anything for her client, or at least this client.
Because she recognized something in Midge, something that Abe is just now starting to recognize in his daughter. When he sits down to dinner with his pal Gabe, and two more men of letters, Arthur and Henry, he is morose, shaken, unengaged with the Algonquin Table banter and intellectual debate of his contemporaries. His world has been shattered by the simple realization -- he’s done it all wrong.
It’s a long, writerly scene, filled with the kind of introspective and philosophical dialogue that could be ponderous in less deft hands. But the crux of it is simple. Here are four older white men, born of the 1800s, rattled by the constant change around them, trying to make peace with it all and realizing, to their creeping horror, that they may have had the wrong view of the world, of their lives, of their children, this whole time.
It’s a bracing thought. We too live in a time of what feels like epochal change to us in the same way it feels to every generation. There is still something harrowing about Abe’s epiphany, one steadily shared by his dining companions. Here are the educated cosmopolitan men, those expected by 1960s society to not only understand how the world works but be the masters of it. It is their jobs, in the eyes of the community and social hierarchy, to be the builders and caretakers of this great civilization.
Only, to Abe’s hollowing dismay, he sees his granddaughter upsetting all of his biases and expectations and, to his credit, it rocks him. He took his son Noah to Columbia, and never considered doing the same for Miriam. He acknowledges that she bought the place that they now live, borne on the backs of her courage and determination. He recognizes a fearlessness in her that he not only didn’t nurture, but doesn’t understand where it came from. (And even in the throes of his realization, can't countenance that she may have gotten it from his Match-Making Mafia combatant of a wife.)
There is an order, a way the world is supposed to work, that has been passed down from Abe by his father and his father and his father. But not to the daughter who disrupts that and makes him understand how the entire system upon which he’s built his life, the entire dynamic and dichotomy that undergirded his worldview, can be dead wrong, and his brave, persevering daughter, who succeeded despite him not because of him, is the living proof.
In the early stretch of Mrs. Maisel, one of the breakthroughs came in Abe understanding why Midge couldn't go back to Joel. It was the beginning of Abe seeing his daughter. Truly seeing her. And now, through her daughter, he sees her ever more clearly, so clearly that, in Tony Shaloub’s best performance on the show, he’s disturbed and disquieted to think about what he missed, and how he got this whole damn thing wrong.
A visit back to her alma mater with her old college comrades sells how close Midge came to sinking into the life her father would have constructed for her. The collegiate scenes are as vivid and fun as any in the show, with witty bon mots and rapid-fire gags as fit for any table. But they’re also a reminder to Midge that, as much fun as these old friends are, as fondly as she remembers her college days, as much as her former pals admire what she’s accomplished, they’re still a part of that world and don’t quite get that stand-up is her career now, not just a detour until she returns to orbit.
That's what she says to Susie in her Grand Central plea to leverage her relationship with Hedy Ford. She accepts having been the good soldier and trusting the process, but wants to make the final push. She acknowledges that it’s a little selfish, but that she wants more. In truth, Midge is a little unfair. Because she agrees that Susie has gone to the mattresses for her time and time again, but questions how far they can go together if Susie won’t go to the absolute limit to help her succeed.
It’s a little more understandable, though, both because Midge doesn’t know the gravity of what she’s asking of Susie and because we’ve seen what happened at the Jack Paar showcase. Susie protests that if Midge does succeed, she won’t want it to be tainted by having had to call in personal favors. But Midge has tried playing fair. She’s tried working twice as hard and being twice as funny for half the money. And it still hasn’t gotten her where she wants to be on talent and hard work alone. So if the playing field is titled against her for reasons beyond her control, why not use whatever arrows are in their quiver, fair or not?
Because most of all, Midge doesn’t want this to be something she did for a few years before settling back down into the staid life her mother and father had been preparing her for all those years. The show teases some of the good times between her and Joel, and as sweet as those were, as fondly as they both look back on them before things went sour, Midge wants more than that now. And in a way her father is just now starting to understand, she has the courage of her convictions to go out and get it.
When Midge opens up a “Letter to her future self” that she wrote in college, it contains only one word -- “don’t.” Maybe we’ll get the context in a flashback in the series finale, something to put a capstone on the thematic throughline of an unexpected boost into feminist rebellion that began the series. Or maybe we won’t. But for now at least, there’s only one other place that word is used.
When Hedy compliments Midge on the sketch she wrote for Prince Margaret, Midge is deferential, accepting her role as the impetus for the idea but crediting the rest of the writing staff for making it funny. Hedy admonishes her with the same word. Don’t. Don’t eschew credit. Don’t cast aside your laurels. Take them. Take them in a world where even the people who love you, well intentioned though they may be, won’t acknowledge them otherwise.
Don’t sell yourself short. Don’t settle for less than you are. Don’t give in to the expectations to simply play the part that's expected. Don’t stop until you’ve done what you set out to do. Maybe it’s just some teenage pablum scrawled into an old coke bottle. Or maybe, somewhere deep down, Midge already knew.
Well...that was weird. It was very cool to see the return of the various people in Tony's life who have died over the course of the show. (Livia excepted for obvious reasons). It felt a lot like the Season 7 premiere of Buffy in that way. Hell, the whole episode felt like "Restless" from Buffy in its way. I was practically expecting the Cheese Man.
But I'm not really sure how to unpack it all. There's a lot of vague symbols and callbacks and call outs to elements of the show. There's a sense that we're exploring Tony's subconscious here. When he confronts his old coach, (who, incidentally, is a big fat guy who smokes a cigar), there's the sense that he's still insecure about his position -- that he feels like he didn't live up to his potential in some way, that he could have lived a straight life and maybe been something more or better.
And there's other little moments beyond the ghost of his friends. He tells Carmela that he wants to come home in the dream (on top of, what I suspect to be his favorite horse). The scenes of Tony in the hotel are very lonely. He won't admit it, and he still gets frustrated at certain things, but he wants Carmela back in his life, and if there's a sweetness to all this weirdness, it's their conversation at the end of the episode where they sound like regular, mildly supportive, interested people for once.
And then there's the most obvious point -- that Tony S. realizes that Tony B. is going to avenge Angelo and it's going to mean that everything goes to shit in its wake. It's the realization that he's going to have to kill someone he loves, or at least see him killed, when he still has tremendous survivor's guilt for the actions that led his cousin to jail without his family and led Tony S. to such success and, from the outside at least, happiness.
There's a lot of other telling little bits there -- Tony confusing an incident with Gloria for one with his mother, his old cop "pal" playing the role of FInn's father (alongside Annette Benning, in an inspired bit of randomness). There was even some metacommentary with "I've seen your TV show" and the man whom I suspect is Gary Cooper on the TV and "it's more interesting than life" "this is your life." I don't know how it fits together necessarily, and maybe that's the point, but I was intrigued by it.
[9.5/10] Is Susie Myerson a friend to the people in her life, or just a mercenary business woman? In the far off, distant year of 1990, combined roast/testimonial by the famed Friar’s Club suggests it’s the latter. The jokes are about her being tough as nails. The stories are about her being a Machiavellian (and persistent) bullshitter and ballbreaker. She’s being championed for these things, even as she’s being softly slated for them, and hearing her whole life’s professional accomplishments laid out in lionizing yet debasing detail seems to lead to nothing but disinterest from the now veteran entertainment legend.
The roast is a fun device. Not only does it allow the producers to bring back Gilmore Girls vets like Sean Gunn and Danny Strong, but it provides the show an excuse to jump around the timeline, giving us glimpses of Susie’s life, and by extension, those in her orbit, long past the main story’s late 1950s/early 1960s timeframe.
Many of those stories are fun, but paint Susie in the light of a manager who took a no-nonsense, “by any means necessary” approach to her job. During the famous triple crown, she pays off caddies, harangues execs, and invents sitcoms on the fly to make three major deals in one day.
When an entitled young hack of an actor demands the world from her, she reads him the riot act and tells him to fuck off. Rumors even fly that she bilked Harry Drake out of his clients when he wasn’t all there. The fellow showbiz muckety-mucks busting her chops seem to admire all of this, but the version of Susie they’re celebrating is slimy, abrasive, and something of a con artist.
And yet, for once, the truth is softer. She did inherit all of Harry Drake's big clients. But not because she got him to sign them over while he was delirious or paid off his daughter. Instead, Harry wanted her to have them because she was the one person he could trust. He saw the way she went the extra mile for Midge, kept her on the right path, and wanted the same for the stars who stayed loyal to him.
Before then, she thanks him for recognizing something in her and helping her get on her feet. Afterwards, she’s the only one who stays by his bedside while he’s dying. And if that weren’t enough, she pretends to be his daughter, not out of some selfish plot to take his business, but to grant him one last measure of kindness and peace in his final moments. The Susy Myerson people don’t know, the part of her life that doesn’t make headlines, are moments like that where she shows appreciation and care for the people who’ve helped make her a success.
Thankfully, that incudes Dinah! One of the small but joyous happy endings The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel offers in its final season is for her, who ends up not only becoming a manager with Susie’s mentorship, but running her whole east coast operation. On a personal level though, she also goes above and beyond a business relationship, to recognize when Dinah is being physically abused and send her goons after the culprit, while also giving Dinah the day off and the time and money to be able to rest and recover. People joke about her mob connections, but she does these things out of kindness. Whatever her faults, she goes out of her way for people, and isn’t just using them to further herself, even the underlings and also-rans with whom she could get away with it.
That same attitude, of course, extends to Midge. In a 1973 Hawiian wedding that Midge wants to break off, Susie tries to draw lines. She’s having a beautiful time and loves the peace and quiet of it all. Professional problems? You got it, Midge. But this is personal. It has to stop somewhere.
Except it doesn’t. It’s Susie who has to explain to the latest celebrity beau why he’s being left at the altar. It’s Susie who has to tell Grand Funk Railroad that their name is confusing and they won’t be playing tonight. It’s Susie who has to endure a comical scene where Abe and Rose go on about how expensive the cake they bought their daughter was. This goes beyond being a manager. This goes beyond business. This is the act of someone who cares.
And I guess, I have to begrudgingly admit, that also includes Joel. He is one of Susie’s greatest challengers here. After noting that she’s in with the mafia, and being wise enough from his dad’s operations to know there’s a second set of books, he’ll do anything to stop the mob from “owning” Midge. So what does he do? He offers himself instead, letting them get their hooks in his nightclub business by way of “financing” in exchange for leaving Midge alone.
Now let’s be real here. This is a stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid plan. It works (more or less) because this is, despite some raunchiness, a generally bright and warmhearted show. But god help me, the answer to someone you love being in the mob is not to get your family in deeper with the mob. We like Frank and Nicky, so we’re apt to buy that they’re men of their word. But in reality, even the gilded reality of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, making deals with the mafia only ends badly for everyone. It’s a dumb solution to a problem that ought to, by all accounts, only make things worse.
And yet, taken in the aspirational tone of the show, this is Joel’s greatest redemption. I still don’t love the guy. I still find him kind of grating and entitled in his own way most of the time. But for someone who didn’t appreciate what he had with Midge, and who didn’t seem to respect her or the life they’d built or her talents as a stand-up, this is an act of him throwing himself in front of this bullet train so that he can protect her, and ensure that she can pursue her career free and clear of the mob’s influence, and not for nothing, the noblest thing he’s ever done.
Maybe that’s the answer for Susie and an improved, if not exactly enlightened Joel. He’s an obnoxious jerk much of the time, but when it counts most, when he has a chance to show he cares about Midge in a way he didn’t when they broke up, he not only seizes it but stays quiet about it for decades so as not to burden her.
With that, Joel is what breaks up Susie and Midge. The prison sentence we learned about a couple episodes back turns out to be the product of an FBI sting for his mob ties. Many of these flash forwards have prompted the audience to ask what could possibly break up Midge and Susie after all they’ve been through. The answer is satisfying. Whatever their issues, Midge cares about Joel. Her seeing him go to jail for her, to help cover for a problem Susie got into, would be a final straw, something big enough and harsh enough that it would change how Midge saw her manager.
It made Susie look more like George from The Gordon Ford Show. Most of this episode is about the future, but the one detail that advances the story in the present is Susie helping stage a coup to get George ousted (and with him, the rule against employees appearing on the show) and get Mike installed as the new producer. The smoking gun is George sitting on Gordon’s network contract so that he can feather his own nest. For all his gladhanding, for all he plucked Gordon from obscurity, he was just using the guy to further himself, putting his needs before his clients.
That's what Midge effectively accuses Susie of. And Susie has things to answer for. I like that several things that have been floating around in the background of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel come to the forefront here. I wondered all through last season how getting in with the mob would come back to bite Susie. Well, now it gets the partner of her number one client sent to jail. It sees Susie kicking thirty percent of Midge’s earnings to the mafia rather than to her. Even Susie’s seemingly pointless gambling problem comes back! With the suggestion that she’s forcing Midge to take tough casino gigs to settle her debts and square up with the wiseguys who own them.
Midge throws it all out there, accusing Susie of doing something worse than lying to her -- using her. When Susie tries to say they’re friends, Midge kicks it back in her face, chalking up the first time Susie ever used that phrase with her as a dodge, a sop, another con from a master of manipulation. In a fiery back-and-forth worthy of being compared to the Gilmore Girls’ “Friday Night's Alright for Fighting” family blow-up, the worst view of Susie comes from the person who arguably knows her best, which makes it sting all the more.
And still, when we return to the Testi-Rostial, something changes. Midge offers a video greeting. And in it, with the time to reflect and reminisce, she realizes that whatever their problems, Susie was always there for her. She was the person who went above and beyond to look after Midge not just as a business associate, but as someone who cared. She saw something in Midge, like Harry saw in her, and helped that fire burn hotter and brighter until the world could ignore it no longer. She fixed wedding disasters and staged talk show coups to clear the way, and rescued Midge’s third favorite hat. These are not the acts of a user; they’re the act of a friend.
But there’s something more too. Susie has seemed ambivalent to so much celebration, barely tolerating this dog and pony show. Only, Midge’s video has power. It is part apology, part expression of gratitude, but also part a recognition of something there that neither of them necessarily realized. When Midge couldn't go through with the wedding, she said that her beaus couldn't make her laugh. She’s cycled through boyfriends and husbands like chewing gum, looking for genuine love. And yet, years later, when she’s celebrating her manager, she talks about how Susie always did make her laugh, how Susie, in deeds not in words, showed her so much of that love. It’s a quiet sign of a quiet truth.
Susie isn’t a craven showbiz snake who treats her clients like expendable meal tickets and her supporters like stepping stones. She’s always been the one who recognizes the human beings beyond the business. And for Midge especially, she’s been more than a friend. She’s been a partner.
[8.8/10] One of the laziest critiques of a horror movie is that “it’s not really scary.” There’s plenty of ways horror films can be great without actually frightening you, whether it’s a film like Rosemary’s Baby where the horror is more atmospheric, to a film like It Follows which is as much about tension and mood as it is about solid scares. There’s tons of different flavors of horror, and restricting “good” horror movies to the ones that you might deem “scary” is unduly limiting to the genre.
But holy hell, IT will scare you. For all the great horror films that have come out in the last decade, I’m not sure there’s one that’s packed in a better frights-per-minute ratio than the 2017 release from director Andy Muschietti. The film tells the story of a group of kids confronting their town’s ancient evil, an entity embodied in the form of “Pennywise the Dancing Clown”, who comes to torment them through the movie in endlessly terrifying ways.
Pennywise doesn't move right. He doesn't sound right. When he’s on the screen, the camera doesn't move right. Everything about his taunts and hauntings, from the slithering, stop and start motions of the malevolent clown, to the music box tinks and winks that melt into auditory mush, to the way the frame goes jittery and the movements turn sudden, are calculated to instill the FDA maximum level of fears in both the film’s pre-teen characters and its audience.
Those scares are a treat worth the price of admission alone. There is expert cinematography, editing, lighting, sound design, and performances all carefully constructed and calculated to extract as much terror as possible in a beautiful, horrific symphony of skin-crawling craft. Choices in the film like the design of Pennywise’s various forms, how he responds when attacked, the aural and visual approach adopted when he seems to possess or consume some innocent soul, offer pound-for-pound the most creative collection of cinematic scares in years.
But beyond just the artistic and creative choices Muschietti and his team put together, IT is a film centered on childhood fears, and it does a good job of capturing the specific feeling of those childhood terrors, beyond just constructing impressively frightful sequences that could unnerve even out of context. There’s a specific sort of chill you get as a child, when you’re sent to grab something out of the basement, told to venture into a darkened room with strange pictures on the wall, forced to explore those little corners of everyday life that seem different and strange.
IT makes those child-like fears of the unknown real and justified. The film does a nice job of escalation. Most of the film’s characters have some initial run-in with Pennywise, where he preys on their deepest fears, but which initially result only in close calls and near misses, that underscore the “it could all just be in my head” sense of youthful doubt. But from there, the encounters become serious and more threatening, as our kid heroes slip deeper and deeper into Pennywise’s disturbing grasp and those childhood fears become realized.
But beyond the scares, IT also does an able job of capturing the more mundane, if no less relatable parts of young adulthood. While the film’s bully antagonists are more than a little extreme, it captures how young kids are with one another better than most films set around this stage of life, horror or otherwise. The central “Losers Club” of local misfits hang amiably with one another, they throw curse words at one other, nurse crushes on one another, get into lanky nerd scuffles and parent-concerning escapades and joust and jaw with one another. There’s some stylized hyperrealism to it all, but there’s also a sense of truth to the dynamic within the Losers Club, of kids who are perhaps a little more adventurous and brave than the average preteens, but otherwise behave and interact like real kids, that makes the movie more relatable, livens the moments when they’re just bonding, and heightens the moments when the film turns to horror.
That turn is just as aided by the film’s visual creativity. The film uses aesthetics to contrast the heavy slice of Americana that is Derry, the town where IT is set, with the cesspools that Pennywise inhabits and lures his prey to. The scenes above ground are filled with warm and bright primary colors: impossibly green grass, gleaming sunshine, and costuming that fits into that world. But when our heroes descend into Pennywise’s domain, or he takes over some corner of their world, the frame becomes literally darker, muddier, immediately cutting a distinction between the nominally cheery world the characters normally occupy and the inky, disquieting evil that lurks just around the edges of it.
The film doesn't necessarily have much on its mind beyond that elemental theme, but does a solid job of motivating each of its characters through those frightening adventures. While some members of the Losers Club can start to blend together, especially in the beginning, rationales like a desire to find a missing sibling, escape from abuse at home, and the misfit acceptance and camaraderie offered by the group all do well to distinguish the main characters and account for why this pack of kids would charge headlong into Pennywise’s anatomically impossible, razor-toothed maw.
There is a recurring motif, albeit one mostly reduced to subtext, of parental figures (almost exclusively men) shaming, rebuking, or outright abusing their children. That lends itself to the film’s conceit of a hidden evil within the seemingly idyllic town, one that children in particular are sensitive to, because they haven’t been socialized into their community’s blind spots and tacit acceptance of such things. And it adds to the terror of the mix of the adult and childlike represented by Pennywise -- a grown man in a playful guise, that adds a psychological undergirding to the horror.
At base, though, IT is just terrifying. Pennywise is terrifying. His pretzel logic assaults are terrifying. Our heroes’ efforts to face him are terrifying. Those frightening moments are balanced by the warmth of the camaraderie among the protagonists, the lived-in feel of their friendships. But that just adds stakes and motivation to those times when they descend into Pennywise’s realm, fight back against his horrifying broadsides, and confront, along with the audience, an avatar of fear worthy of the chills he inflicts on his victims on the screen and in front of it.
[7.4/10] So there’s three main threads in this one. Let’s take them from latest to greatest.
I wasn’t necessarily enamored with Cartman’s suicide story. It’s not that I don’t think the South Park team can approach the issue in a funny way (hell, they managed it with Mr. Mackey last season) but I have to admit, I’m a little tired of the show stretching out Cartman and Heidi’s relationship with it like this. It’s an easy gag, that Cartman gloms onto some social cause but really is just trying to spite his friends and be self-aggrandizing. The Linkin Park parody is a bit amusing. But overall it just doesn’t hit like the other threads in the episode.
What does, in more ways than one, is all the distracted drivers running over children. It just 100% shouldn’t be that funny, but something about the way the gag escalates, and the way distracted driving increases as a problem while Cartman is so devoted to one-upping it, is hilarious. Matt & Trey know how to take dark material and make it funny in the ludicrousness of it, and this is no exception.
The best plot in the episode, however, centers on Tweak freaking out about the nuclear threat from North Korea, and his boyfriend, Craig, trying to comfort him. For one thing, Tweak and Craig stealthily turned into one of the sweetest couples on television, so seeing Craig try to comfort Tweak was strangely heartwarming. At the same time, it’s pretty amusing watching Tweak freak out about North Korea, make an effort to calm things, and then have the situation not only escalate, but be directed specifically at him. It’s also a nice arc for Craig to learn not just to try to problem solve, but to help Tweak talk through his feelings and figure out for himself what would make him feel better.
That leads to the great culmination of all three storythreads at the end. The finale song “Just Put It Down” is peak South Park comedy. The way it makes fun of inspirational videos while taking the stuffing out of Trump for his ridiculous twittery brinksmanship is just genius, and it incorporates not only Tweak and Craig’s solution, but the distracted driving problem (from people look at Trump tweets) and Cartman trying to steal the show. It’s a superb culmination that bumps the episode up a notch.
Overall, a very funny episode built on the back of the great Tweak-Craig storyline and burnished by the silliness of bumper car road mayhem.
