Mad Men: Season Two
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Movie Reviews of Mad Men: Season Two
Movie Review: The glamorous life
Summary: 5 Stars
The second season of MAD MEN is even better the first, which already established it as perhaps the best series to debut on American television in this decade. The pleasures are not simply in the plot (although it moves quickly and constantly surprises you) or in the acting (though it is also topnotch), but in the details: in some ways this series is the early 21st-century equivalent of Edith Wharton's 1920 novel THE AGE OF INNOCENCE, in that it brings us back to a more conservative time among some very privileged and powerful New Yorkers, and immerses us completely in the precisely observed anthropological details of their lives. (The attention given to the clothes, hairstyles, design, and mores of the early Sixties period is, as in the previous season, breathtaking.) But here the top of the heap are not marked out as in the Wharton novel by familial connections (though those too are represented here--and shown to be largely dying out) but, as fitting the Kennedy era, by capitalistic endeavor.
The series's central characters, by the beginning of the season, have achieved certain prizes for themselves, but all at a price. Don Draper (Jon Hamm), the creative head of the Madison Avenue agency Sterling Cooper, has been promoted to the position of partner. His beautiful blonde wife Betty (January Jones), has worked out some sort of arrangement with her husband after the first season's finale that he will no longer stray from her or be away for long unexplained periods. Roger Sterling (John Slattery), Don's arrogant and entitled boss, has overcome two coronaries and is back in the office. His former mistress, the office manager Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks), finally has landed the handsome man with a bright career she's dreamed of finding, while her former charge in the secretarial pool, Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss) has climbed her way to become Sterling Cooper's first woman copywriter. Even the slimy Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser), whom Don vanquished at the end of the previous season, is married to a woman who adores him and enjoys a Park Avenue apartment. But no one is happy, or willing to settle for what they have; they all feel they could somehow do better. Their ability to jeopardize everything they have for what more they might get is what makes the series so brilliant a commentary on the America of 1962. The best of the actors, Hamm, Slattery, and Holloway (and also Melinda McGraw as a new character, a Borscht Belt comedian's tough and sexy wife), disappear so into their characters you would be able to recognize them walking down the street just by their postures; the writers are up to the same high level, and most every gesture or line of dialogue has layers of meanings. (Pay attention, for example, to the multiple subtexts of a bit of business in the season's second episode, when Pete Campbell's mother, during the midst of a family crisis, insists on giving her daughter-in-law Trudy a porcelain elephant tchotchke.)
One of the pleasures of this beautiful DVD set is that the series creator Matt Weiner provides commentary for almost all the episodes; he has such a firm sense of what he wanted to do with every scene that his commentary is terrific and tells you how almost everything you caught the first time round was intentional. (Also, he blessedly mostly eschews the jargon most television writers use in describing their work.) The season is worth multiple viewings, and is as textured and finely worked as a great multi-plot novel. The DVD set also comes with some dandy other extras besides episode commentaries, including an overview of Jacqueline Kennedy's February 1962 televised tour of the White House (which features importantly into the season's first episode), capsules of the era's historical events, and an informative guide to 1960s fashion styles, which covers the entire decade and might be a clue to what we'll see in upcoming seasons.
Movie Review: Don't Think Twice (It's Alright)
Summary: 5 Stars
The second season of this AMC series is in story/character sense a lot like the second season of Sopranos was for itself. This season spends it's thirteen episodes expanding upon what has already been established at the same time as it balances sudden new story devices and taking things to their next logical (or sometimes illiogical based on the character) extensions. I found it very enjoyable and while it may not be a full reflection of life in the sixies it truly shows the aspects that it aspires to quite well and shows flawed characters who are full of unfortunate parallels with people in the world today.
This is a show that is telling a specific story while exploring specific character's in an attempt to disect certain issues within our world today. I look at this show as a reflection of recent times, the issue of never being happy with what you have and looking for happiness in the wrong places and feeling lost and unsure of your place in the world is something I see a lot of people dealing with in the world around me. The setting of the sixties is almost the perfect era to pair with such seemingly lost and depressed character's because of it's ironic nature at the same time as the literal sense of reinvention and change that occured in that time.
I feel the first season did a fantastic job of setting up this series. The second season acheived it's goal of expanding, elaborating and extending upon the world and character's we were introduced to. The third season is set up, like most shows, to take the best from the first and second seasons and finally show us a complete vision of the show without being tied down by these mandatory practices.
The second season contains the following 13 Episodes:
1 For Those Who Think Young
2 Flight 1
3 The Benefactor
4 Three Sundays
5 The New Girl
6 Maidenform
7 The Gold Violin
8 A Night to Remember
9 Sixth Month Leave
10 The Inheritance
11 The Jet Set
12 The Mountain King
13 Meditations in an Emergency
This DVD release will be a 4-disc set presented in Anamorphic Widescreen Video, English Dolby 5.1 Audio, with Subtitles in English & Spanish along with closed captioning for the hearing impaired.
The Packaging for both the DVD and Blu-Ray is described as being "available as a limited-edition sleek shirt box with see through window".
Special Features Announced So Far Include:
-Audio Commentaries With Cast & Crew on all 13 Episodes
-"Birth Of An Independent Woman Parts 1 & 2" - Featurette examining the rise of female independence in the 60's.
-"An Era Of Style" - Featurette exploring the fashion of the 1960's and it's lasting influence on designer's today.
-"Time Capsule" - Interactive featurettes paying homage to historic events on the 1960's and the daring generation that lived through them.
I will update my review when/if any more special features or information are given closer to July, when this will be released. I will also update my review when I have actually seen the special features on the set, but for now I have seen these episodes and think there is a lot to be found here for those interested and on top of that this show looks beautiful. Thanks For Your Time.
*Rather than further clutter up this review page I have included a list of short non spoiler giving episode descriptions in my comments section for those interested.
Movie Review: Mad Men Takes Us Back and Forward
Summary: 5 Stars
Before I watched MAD MEN, I thought it was a pretty crazy idea to set the series back in the 1960s. I grew up in that era and didn't particularly want to experience a tv show set in it. Then I saw it and kept seeing it and changed my mind. MAD MEN is about the advertising industry beginning in USA 1960 but it is so much more than that. It brings back the way we lived then, forcing us to look back and then compare it with the way we live now. In so many ways that is a shocking experience on a continual basis. When I first saw pregnant women smoking and drinking on the show, I was aghast, considerably more aghast than when I saw it in real life back in that time era. This is because NO ONE is seen (in public at least) smoking and drinking while pregnant, especially if one is upwardly mobile. Another shock was to see racism and sexism flaunted on a daily basis in both the work place and socially as something that was totally ok and legal. MAD MEN works on so many levels and is so well layered in meaning largely because it is so well written. That writer is former SOPRANOS' writer, Matthew Weiner. He depicts the Sterling Cooper advertising agency on the surface of the show but the lies and deceit, which are the daily business of the agency, are also the stuff of the characters' personal lives as well. Weiner hand picked the lead for his show, Jon Hamm, playing Don Draper, the creative director and junior partner of Sterling Cooper. Draper leads a wholly manufactured life as he took over another man's identity during the war. He is not the real Don Draper, the real one having died by his side in the war. The best moment of the show is when his boss (Bertram Cooper played by Robert Morse) is told of this deception by an underling and his response is that it doesn't matter. He sees that the artifice and facade of Draper works for his agency and he could care less about Draper's "truth" just like he could care less about the truth of the products he advertises. Jon Hamm is outstanding as Draper. He is absolutely the lead of the show and his continual crisis of identity and living a life of complete falsehood continues to unravel in him in Season Two. A business trip out to California is the springboard and his time spent there is fascinating. The other characters continue to develop too. Betty Draper, Don's wife, is continually fascinating as the beautiful, perfect trophy wife with a completely placid surface and an underneath of tsunami level suppressed rage. I remember this era best by all the women whom Betty Draper represents. Don and Betty are my favorite characters but the other characters intrigue me as well. Pete Campbell and Peggy Olsen come together yet again this season, rediscovering one another after their disastrous coming together in season one. Pete remains the biggest thorn in Don's side while Peggy represents his best help in all crises. Joan Holloway as the buxom, red headed chief secretary seems to be putting a perfect life together for herself with a doctor fiance yet she conceals his sexual brutality towards her from everyone. On the surface she uses her sexuality to advance herself but at every other level it undermines her. I could go on and on about the other characters and plotlines on the show but this is fascinating stuff that you need to discover fresh for yourselves. I would watch the series in order, first season one and then season two. For me, season three begins in just a few weeks and I will be parked in front of the screen taking it in.Movie Review: MAd Men -The times they are a changin'
Summary: 5 Stars
Mad Men! The cable TV series first and second seasons are now out in video. This series won Emmy's for best actor and best dramatic series and a ton of other awards. Deals with Madison Avenue account executives at fictitious Sterling Cooper, first year covers 1960, second 1962. For those who remember, this series is astoundingly accurate in it's depiction of mores, attitudes, clothing styles of the time, perhaps more so than any other movie or series I've ever seen. Ad guys swill liquor in their offices, shoot around ad ideas, flirt with and occasionally diddle secretaries in the office. Company Men in grey flannel suits, and women in red lipstick, full dresses with yards of crinolines, stockings and spike heels. It's a man's world! The Ad men smoke like proverbial chimneys. Everyone smokes. Women are housewives or sexy secretaries. Blacks are elevator operators, and maids. Gays don't exist. There is a great deal of insight into how Madison Avenue did (and still does) use our desires for happiness to manipulate and distort products thru advertizing. The Lucky Strike "toasted" ads (in season one)are a great example.
I have read where reviewers, younger ones, don't believe Mad Men. Well, if it's an exaggeration, it isn't an exaggeration by much. Some things are done for dramatic effect, to emphasis the difference between then and now - but this really was the times! In the second season, Peggy Moss, the plucky secretary who breaks into the all male account execs, gets invited to hear a Bob Dylan concert. The backdrop of historical events, racial problems, freedom riders, the space race, Marilyn Monroe, Kennedy and Nixon, sets off the action. Even the extra feature time capsules are fascinating. Jon Hamm, who my wife tells me is really handsome, plays Don Draper, the beleaguered, mysterious, complex, womanizing head of Creative at Sterling Cooper and won best actor. January Jones plays Betsy, his Barbie Doll wife. She appears in a swanky restaurant looking like a goddess, Don gazes at her and Rimsky Korsakov's lush "Song of India" starts playing (repeatedly in following episodes). When Betsy finds her young daughter smoking cigarettes in the closet, she diciplines her, not for taking a dangerous addictive drug, but because she might burn the house down being careless!
"The Times, They are a Changin'", and this is a remarkable look at how things were just before they did!
This series, can't be too highly recommended in a time when many movies are disappointing! It's really the best thing out there, by a mile. Start from the beginning, season one, or it won't make sense. Very complex plots with a hundred plot lines at once. It shows what Hollywood can do if they really try.
(I rented these DVD's from the video store for this review)
Movie Review: Better than ever...
Summary: 5 Stars
*Spoilers ahead!*
Having just finished watching my boxed set, I would like to add my opinion to those who have already boldly stated theirs.
Compulsively watchable in Season One, "Mad Men" in Season II is even more so, for it is here that we explore the relationships between the characters in depth, and watch as the plot lines set forth become more involved and fascinating. I felt that Season II was the season of Betty Draper, although we also saw Peter Campbell's relationships both weaken and explode, Peggy grow into a more confident part of the team, and Joan Holloway give away her smoldering sexuality to a man who looks like the perfect match but who has sexual hangups that are hard to watch.
As played by the stunning January Jones, Betty in Season One seemed like a beautiful ice maiden, always perfect down to her manicured nails, never out of control, able to withstand her suspicions of Don's infidelity without cracking her veneer. In Season II all comes unravelled, and it is mesmerizing to watch as Betty's fragile hold on normalcy comes unglued. I found myself cheering her on as she finally took hold of her life and wrested from it the shreds of her dignity. I'm still not sure I like her, but I started to respect her.
Don, as always mysterious, inscrutable, and morally bankrupt, undergoes a sea change as well. Jon Hamm owns this part just as Michael C. Hall owns the part of "Dexter". I watched enthralled as he went from a defensive, combative, egocentrically ambitious man to one floundering for the meaning of his life. Without giving too much away, I can say that this was handled well by the writers, as they had to work within a time frame and could not accomplish everything by use of flashback without dragging Season II out too long. What makes Don Draper a fascinating character is the way, just when he seems like the coldest cad imaginable, he then becomes a loving father or a caring mentor. The writing in this series is truly fine.
All of the supporting characters are excellent and have an essential part to play, as it should be with a series of this caliber. John Slattery is always a favorite, so quick-witted and shamelessly lecherous, and the frat boy club of Ken Cosgrove, etc. are always fun and interesting to watch.
History itself is a star of the show, as we watch the sixties simmer and explode, much as Betty Draper herself. To those of us who lived through those years, the backdrop is every bit as interesting as the characters themselves. One can't help but mourn what has befallen regular programming on television, when you see what can be produced by people who really care.