"The Wire" on HBO

marlo is a good character; i just hate him

marlo's incredible, though he took awhile to grow on me. only bc i was attached to the barksdale/bell hierarchy. but the marlo crew is so good in S4.

Yeah Marlo/Chris/Snoop make a pretty fascinating/unconventional criminal organization

Marlo's the perfect successor to the Barksdale story arc, the opposite in every aspect

Haven't watched this in 6 years, excited to rewatch the HD versh, perhaps with a white person

was just thinking about their locations and their characters -- Barksdale always holed up in a secret back room or basement -- untrusting, anxious, almost paranoid. Marlo in his totally unassuming open, empty concrete lot/park/whatever that was, all brains and cunning, unemotional, no need for physicality or feeling protected.

nah i just figured you were some mr show dork fan who just loves odenkirk

― marcos, Tuesday, January 13, 2015 2:26 PM (35 minutes ago)

i am tbh

and Donette's line was "no doubt"

xp - Marlo meets out in the open because it is harder to be wiretapped/recorded that way. The narrative goes into this multiple times.

That doesn't disprove his point

yes it does, Marlo is even more untrusting and paranoid

He's willing to trade the vulnerability of being out in the open for the assurance of not being wiretapped, duh

Yeah true, maybe that's not the best explanation. But there does seem to be something about the location that reflects his coldness or maybe moral emptiness or something, it's like his homebase is a non-place.

He seems to have ties to nothing, maybe. D'Angelo Barksdale has ties to the past, his family, etc., meets in old backrooms with old furniture. IDK, maybe just grasping at straws. It certainly at least seems like Barksdale's locations are warmer than Marlo's.

the barksdales (esp bell) see drugs as a means to something and their self-protection is to not lose what they have and to keep building. marlo sees the drug game as a thing to win in itself, his desire is sort of inhuman; idk if "psychotic" is the right word really. the writers toy with fascist ideas with him, or at least a "purity" of will-to-power

i think the thing about Marlo, which also is reflected in the larger narrative about kids and how they get "in the game" younger and younger, is that Marlo seems a lot more childlike than Avon and Stringer. He has that cold eyed Damian from the Omen thing going on. One of Marlo's first sociopathic scenes is stealing lollipops. Could you see Avon or Stringer even eating a lollipop? One of his hangouts is at a playground. You see him bribing kids with candy. You rarely see him interested in sex. Maybe this just shows that he is savvier than his predecessors in terms of empire building, but Avon and Stringer come across more as "men" than Marlo.

I don't think it's an accident htat his name recalls Heart of Darkness xp

Avon is pretty plugged into his surrounding community beyond his gang: hosting cookouts, participating in the East/West hoops game, helping Cutty out with the boxing ring.

xp yeah, and lisa stansfield

I always saw Marlo's rise as an inevitable moral decay (i.e. "Game the same, just got more fierce") of the prevailing social institution, like how globalization replaces personal connections with streamlined capital.

man marlo's flatness is almost made up for by that final shot standing on the corner in his gold suit, bleeding from his cut

I also love the way he goes 'yeah' under his breath like he's convincing himself that he's the best

― =皿= (dyao), Monday, December 28, 2009 10:14 PM (5 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I've found the first three seasons a slog a lot of the time, especially s2, but I kept going to reach s4 because that's the one people rave about.

Reading Difficult Men, about the post-Sopranos TV revolution, and Simon makes it really clear that he was more interested in the political message than the characters which explains a lot of the weaknesses and makes me glad that he had people like Price and Pelecanos to do character work. In his head, it's agit-prop, like a social realist novel. A fresh ambition in TV terms but old-fashioned really. And psychologically incurious compared to The Sopranos.

I always saw Marlo's rise as an inevitable moral decay (i.e. "Game the same, just got more fierce") of the prevailing social institution, like how globalization replaces personal connections with streamlined capital.

― Baruch Olbermann (Leee), Tuesday, January 13, 2015 6:34 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm

yup

I don't think it's an accident htat his name recalls Heart of Darkness xp

Also "Marlo" is an anagram for "Omar L".

weebay.gif

The end of season 4... So tough.

I've watched the first three seasons multiple times, but the last two only once despite owning DVDs of both and having access to them on Amazon Prime. After all this discussion I decided to dial up season 4 and halfway through episode 1 it is already depressing as hell. Not sure if I'm going to be able to make it all the way through.

it's the hardest to get through for sure by that measurement, but it's also the show's best season by a wiiiide margin imo. don't give up!

xp if you don't like depressing shows, then I don't know why you are watching this series

I think I had a greater capacity for it in the past. It's maybe a bit different now that my kid is about the same age as the kids in the show. Also, the first time around I didn't know how their plots would all turn out. Now that I do, there's definitely a greater feeling of dread.

There's always Namond.

things turn out pretty well for him beyond his dad being in jail for life and his mom being terrible, but it's true that his new family is a step up, so I guess that's a happy ending

hating namond's mom is so invigorating though.

ohhhhh i hate her.

how I start every morning

wait till bey hear about this...

he's fine as long as his fish get cleaned and fed

namonds mom is the worst, so much fun to hate her

innocuous scenes like the one in ep. 2 where Cutty is trying to talk Michael into training to be a boxer are harder to watch when you know where the plot is going

Every scene with happy Randy is awful on rewatch...

exactly

There is a moment I caught on rewatch, which I now can't let go, which is when Carcetti and Norman goes to see Rawls after the election. They speak about stats and all that, and all of a sudden Rawls say, that the reason everyone in Baltimore loves stats, is because they all are promoted from Affirmative Action, and since they got their jobs from numbers games, that is all they know. And you realize, if there were no stats, a white boys club would just take over everything, without any kind of control.

Was there a McNulty-speaking-to-the-presumed-good-old-boy-county-sheriff subtext going on there as well?

Well, the clear subtext is that Rawls wants Carcetti to give him Burrells job as police commissioner, so he's stating what sets him apart from the other candidates: That he is white.

yeah, it's a smokescreen to divert attention from the truth. burrell isn't beholden to the numbers bc he's a black police officer who reached his position through affirmative action. he's that way bc he's a hack at police work who somehow managed to be blessed w/ good political instincts - and that description also fits rawls, to a fucking t.

burrell's exit speech to rawls has that lovely note where after he says rawls will eat the political class' shit for a living he adds "daniels too, when he gets here" and rawls' face for a moment is like yezhov's, hollow triumph

speaking of the stalinists, how about marlo's brisk takeover speech to the co-op (headed by joe's empty chair)? textbook.

just watched season 5, ep5 - dukie asking cutty, "how do we get from here to the rest of the world?" is beyond heartbreaking

New David Simon series:
http://curbed.com/archives/2015/01/28/show-me-a-hero-david-simon-yonkers.php

The miniseries is directed by Paul Haggis, who won the best picture Oscar in 2006 for his film Crash, which explored racial tensions in Los Angeles. Mayor Wasicsko is played by Oscar Isaac, the handsome star of the upcoming Star Wars Episode VII movie. The defeated incumbent mayor is played by Jim Belushi, and Winona Ryder and Catherine Keener are also on board, along with the Argentine actress Carla Quevedo.

The miniseries is directed by Paul Haggis

uh-oh

if he isn't writing it, there shouldn't be too many ways to for him to fuck the project up