Don't let the picture above fool you. There's nothing spectacular about 19th place.
"We're trending up boys, we are trending up," said Erlich on the season finale.
Richard's compressor cloud thingie wows everyone at the trade conference, and Pied Piper is back on track -- until next season when it tanks again. The key to this show, besides good writing (natch) is that these guys can't seem to get a break. Now that they have a big one it's already less compelling.
Still, HBO has managed to do something that the regular networks can't (as usual), and that's create a show that actually reflects something that is happening in our country in real-time. Usually the major networks are about five years behind reality. That's probably because they are run by older dudes scrambling to find younger dudes to reflect what they think even younger dudes want to see. HBO is smart; it finds people with singular visions for shows and then lets them run with it.
While everyone will be talking about the Horndog's grisly death at the hands of The Mountain that raped and killed his sister (and oh, my... what a grisly death), I'd like to deconstruct the scene between Jaime and Tyrion in his jail cell.
I've mentioned before that anyone who is an academic in Disability Studies must be having a field day with this show. Tyrion himself is an archetype of "The Other," differently abled with a proverbial heart of gold. The smartest man in the room. This week though he spoke of his cousin Orson, who, after being dropped on his head by his wet nurse became a "simpleton." Until now the only other developmentally disabled person on the show has been Hodor ("Hodor! Hodor!") but we learned that as a child, Tyrion was obsessed with his cousin, who used to spend all of his days smashing beetles under rocks. He goes into great detail about it and about how he tried to figure out what it all meant. Why did he constantly smash beetles?
New York-based documentary filmmaker Robert Greene recognizes that the world is a stage. But if people are its performers, he says, how can truth ever be unveiled?
"Everyone of us is performing. I'm performing right now, and you are too," Greene says to me during a phone interview.
I, being the interviewer, and he the interviewee, Greene says, is a dichotomy of exploitative roles. Who is exploiting whom? Is either of us really exploiting the other? How do you get truth if this is a performance?
Greene approaches documentary filmmaking with this in mind. And in his latest work, Actress, which premieres in the Bay Area Thursday, June 5, as the Opening Night Film for the 13th SF DocFest at Brava Theater, $20, Greene employs elements of melodrama and cinema verité to create a present-tense portrait of Brandy Burre, a complicated woman torn between the roles of being a lover, a mom, an actress -- and herself.
