BANSHEE - I fell a little behind on Banshee and I deeply regret letting that happen. I caught up on seasons 2 & 3 in the last few weeks and have been blown away by what they've done, by raising the bar for serialized action television beyond anything else anyone else is making. Being on Cinemax, which is a network that knows its audience and knows what they want, Alan Ball and Jonathan Tropper and and the cast & crew of Banshee can go completely balls-out and deliver everything that people like me are looking for on television. On the surface, there are beautiful women who are naked a lot & fight a lot and lots of explosions and fights and shootouts and did I mention fights? Those provide plenty of engaging scenes every episode to keep the audience coming back for more but what I've been impressed with is the progression of quality from season to season; the writing and attention to detail that might get overlooked and burned away in a lesser, loud, fast paced show. The world they've written is so rich and the people so fleshed out and, perhaps best of all, so original and interesting and weird.* Banshee is unapologetic, brutal, bloody, fast, kinetic, smart pulp fiction, and I love every moment of it. Banshee is Justified on the next level, Justified without the limits of network cable. And the Proctor-Hood dynamic is the closest thing we're going to get to the Raylan Givens-Boyd Crowder firecracker of a relationship that Justified gave us for 6 years.
THE MOUNTAIN GOATS - "BEAT THE CHAMP" - Beat The Champ is the latest from the prolific songwriter John Darnielle and The Mountain Goats and their best in years. Where the last few albums seemed to plod along pleasantly down the same road the group has trod for a few years now, their latest offering is a love letter to something near and dear to Darnielle: the squared circle. The whole album isn't about wrestling, but where it excels is when Darnielle marries the low-brow glory of local wrestling with meditations on life and death and childhood. We see the world of these wrestlers through the eyes of Darnielle, how he imagined them as a boy, as heroes in masks and capes, and how he thinks of them now as a grownup, their struggle in the ring for a little bit of glory and maybe a couple bucks to make the long drive home worth the trip. Darnielle has never shied away from documenting his life as a child in the shadow of the tormentor that was his stepfather so one can't help but imagine little John watching these people become superheroes in the ring and have this world to escape to, even if only one match at a time.
THE WINTER FAMILY by Clifford Jackman - Clifford Jackman has submitted a piece of work in what has become one of my favorite genres in the last few years, the dusted off and resuscitated western. The titular Winter family, guided with an unwavering and unrelenting iron fist by patriarch Augustus Winter, stalk their prey all over post-Civil War America as henchmen, bounty hunters and outlaws in search of carnage and chaos wherever they can find it. There's a theme of resistance to the march of time and progress that Augustus leads the fight against, the resistance of the oncoming growth of civilization and civility. In recent years, works by the late Robert B. Parker, Joe R. Lansdale, and the modern classic The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt, have all touched on the elements of the classic western story and given it new life by injecting a modern sense of storytelling and, my favorite, some neo-noir bloodlust.
KILL ME THREE TIMES - This is an odd little movie about a hit man who is summoned to a small town at the behest of a bar owner who believes his wife is cheating on him. His suspicions are confirmed, but with that realization comes an entire intricate web of double and triple crosses to come crashing down. The movie is oddly paced and it keeps you interested simply because of how off-kilter it all seems; you want to keep watching as each thread of the story slowly comes unraveled to reveal the next odd turn. It's not really a comedy but it's not dramatic enough to be a thriller; it's somewhere in between, an Elmore Leonard-style dark comedy noir. Simon Pegg plays the hit-man caught up in the middle of a crooked cop, a dangerous bartender, an angry boyfriend, a spurned dental assistant, a hapless dentist, a woman who has an almost cartoonish ability to avoid being killed and a bag of cash.
THE GOLDEN STATE WARRIORS - I'd be remiss if I failed to mention the hometown heroes, the Association's best, my Golden State Warriors. They finished the year 67-15 which, for the uninitiated, is historically good, like, Michael Jordan and the Bulls good.^ As a native Southern Californian, the LA Lakers were a natural choice for my fandom but I've always disliked the Lakers for numerous reasons. The Warriors are a perfect team to get behind; they're smart, well coached, disciplined and humble, and they're winning in ways that people had previously thought teams couldn't win by. Old school basketball people like Charles Barkley want teams to have traditional big men and be able to drive to the basket with strength and power but what the Warriors do is funnel the ball to the outside shooters, most notably Klay Thompson and the league MVP this year, Stephen Curry and use their quickness, ball-handling skills and sharpshooting abilities to outscore just about everyone. Traditionally, teams have a point guard who brings the ball up the court and sets up the play and distributes it to the playmakers but Golden State has the best shooter the league has ever seen who, every time, can either just spot up and shoot a three or, because he commands so much attention, outsmart the defense and get the ball to someone else on their incredibly deep team who can get an easy shot. Steve Kerr, formerly of the aforementioned Chicago Bulls teams with Michael Jordan, is a first-year coach who led his team to the best record in the NBA and have already completed a first round sweep of the New Orleans Pelicans in the playoffs. I can't wait to watch their deep playoff run this year and with the defending champion San Antonio Spurs already knocked out, the presumptive representative of the Eastern Conference, the Cleveland Cavaliers, reeling from an injury, a suspension and an old, rusty set of bench players, and no other real competition, I'm hoping the boys will bring a Larry O'Brien trophy to the Bay Area for the first time in almost 40 years.
*Banshee villains include Kai Proctor, former Pennsylvania Dutch Amish turned butcher and gangster; Chayton Littlestone, a brutal, rogue Native American sociopath whose life mission is to take back what the White man has stole from his ancestors; Rabbit, a Russian gangster who was at one time our hero Lucas Hood's former boss; Neo-Nazis; a gangster who is so physically large that he travels in a mobile office inside a tractor-trailer and an unhinged Army colonel.
^That still may not hold any significance for the uninitiated.
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