Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957) – with Tony Curtis as an advertising hack and Jayne Mansfield as, I guess, herself – was fun, if fluffy, stuff: light satire of Madison Avenue and celebrity culture, with some really good comic moments and quaint (in the best way) double entendres (polishing one’s Oscar, anyone?)

Auntie Mame (1958), with Rosalind Russell in the title role – the story of a vivacious, free-thinking socialite and her orphaned nephew, told over a period of nine years during the Depression, in vignettes – has its share of great comedy, too; the beginning and end shine particularly brightly.

Puce Moment, from WFMU’s Beware Of The Blog.

The first season of Mad Men was well-written, entertaining, engaging; the second was the same, no doubt, but with a more explicitly intellectual bent: the question of identity, alluded to in the first season, became in the second season not just a narrative device (who is Don Draper?), but the central concern – who are we all? how do we create our identities? or, alternatively, how are our identities created for us?

If the first season established the characters and their milieu, the second season – especially its second half – undid them; by the last episode, almost nothing remained of what we thought we knew – identities, seemingly stable, had been altered radically, including Sterling-Cooper’s itself. If this seems like a strange way to advance a story, I can only imagine things becoming more uncanny; we’ve only reached 1962 after all…

A potential for greatness existed from the outset – there’s almost no better place to confront the question of who we are than a Madison Avenue advertising firm at the beginning of the 60s (watch the documentary, The Century of the Self, for a potent critique of PR, advertising, the creation of desire and mass control – scary stuff) – but for the most part while watching the show I thought I was being entertained, not interrogated; which makes this is some of the cleverest TV I’ve ever watched – I actually found myself surprised at the depths the show achieved, wondering how we had arrived and where the show could possibly go next. 

I realize I’m not talking about the characters, the plot – anything materially relevant to the show itself – but I’m still getting over my initial shock at its depth. I love almost all the characters, particularly those drawn with more detail, and I hope I can write contemporaneous posts as the third season airs, and do justice to their stories.

Finished the second season today. My earlier misgivings were eased somewhat – what I took for a devolution toward soap opera may instead have been a long set up for the show’s theme – that becoming what you desire requires willful forgetting. This is most obvious where it concerns Don’s and Peggy’s storylines, but it also sheds light on Pete, Roger, Joan and Salvatore. Also, the second half of the season is just more fun – our attention is brought back to the office and its subtle politics, the arena in which most of the first season took place. It’s what I’d been missing from the first half of the season.

I’m halfway through Season 2 of Mad Men and I feels like it’s falling prey to Soap Opera Syndrome – Six Feet Under’s second season felt this way, too, and I never picked it up again. I’m still going to finish it – I’ve invested the time, and there are interesting ideas – but the turn toward melodrama is unexpected. Maybe it’s a shift in perspective from the men on the show to the women? I’ll think about this more – I’ve got the 3rd disc waiting…

Cynical C links to When An Audience Member Had To Fill in on Drums for a Passed Out Keith Moon. It starts getting emotional about half-way through. Townsend is invigorated. When the band takes a bow, John Entwhistle congratulates the guy in what I think is a hand-painted, long-sleeved, button-up, high-collared skeleton shirt.

The next step.

Congratulations to my sister-in-law, Gaby, and my new brother-in-law, Dana, on their recent marriage in Costa Rica (or, Why I Haven’t Been Writing For The Past Week – thanks, Jayson, for filling in). Congratulations also to Barack Obama for his current 10-in-a-row winning streak. Quick notes: I saw Michael Clayton recently and liked it quite a bit – a great look at law, corporate malfeasance, and the intersection of the two, it features pitch-perfect performances from George Clooney and Tilda Swinton in particular (had a nice back-and-forth about it with Dan Sallitt over at his blog); Mr. Untouchable was a solid documentary about Nicky Barnes, the man at the center of the Harlem heroin trade in the 1970s and the high-level players he betrayed – it brought to mind the excellent Cocaine Cowboys, a doc about the Miami cocaine wars that peaked a little bit later. 

So this isn’t a review of the film, but more a reason to show our faithful readers (blogateers, ho!) a trailer that would/could make you download in your pants. This is a 1971 Mario Bava masterpiece more popularly known as “Bay of Blood” but released initially in the US with the title “Twitch of the Death Nerve” (which wins the award for best movie title of all time (next to “Fast and Furious : Tokyo Drift” of course)). This is the film that laid the groundwork for all of those 80s giant body count slashers we’ve come to know and… well… sometimes love, but mostly watch out of obligation.  In fact a number of kills in “Friday the 13th” were taken directly from “Death Nerve.” Suck on that. But don’t blame Bava too hard for creating a genre that kills fun teens (aka ones who like beer and doing it) and rewards nerds (aka the ones that don’t) – he didn’t know how weird America would be in the 80s.  Anyfart, here’s the trailer and I’d have to say it might be my fav based on aesthetics alone.   Oh yeah, the Italian title is “Reazione a Catena.”