Nobody Beats Midas

Next time a guy feels like a nobody, he can take heart he's in kickass company. He can have a look at 2021's Nobody, an action movie starring Bob Odenkirk--Saul from Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad--who kind of gets the chance to play Walter White here. The story is far less substantial than Breaking Bad, though, and this movie is unabashedly an indulgent men's fantasy. It has some real nice fight scenes.

Odenkirk plays Hutch, an ordinary family man whose boring routine we see demonstrated with rapidly repeated edits of him taking out the trash, getting coffee, and going to work. Then some burglars break in and, despite being able to get the drop on one, he lets them go. After this, his family, friends, and even the police make unsubtle cracks about his manhood. Oh, little do they know!

Where Breaking Bad had its protagonist solve his emasculation by turning to crime, Nobody has a protagonist who essentially has superpowers he's morally and legally permitted to exercise at any moment. In this world, power comes at no cost. It's just pure, sweet power, baby.

First he decides to take on a group of gangsters harassing a young woman on a bus, a really nicely choreographed tussle. Then he finds himself systematically taking down a Russian mob boss.

Christopher Lloyd has a small role as Hutch's father who, for some reason, seems to be equally competent with guns and fists--thanks to creative editing (Lloyd's actually looking very frail).

The movie's pure fluff but we're all in the mood for that now and then.

Nobody is available on HBOMax.

Saul is Called Again

The first two episodes of the new season of Better Call Saul appeared on Netflix last night. These are the first new episodes in two years and they're pretty good. It really feels like the show picks up where it left off right down to having the same strengths and weaknesses.

The subplots involving Gus and Nacho and Lalo are still not remotely interesting while Jimmy's decent into Saul-hood is captivating. But I think the question on everyone's mind is, "What happens to Kim?"

I like how she's become a co-conspirator in the creation of Saul. The scene in the country club was terrific fun and I was happy to see the show has gone back to the original concept of Jimmy playing he Jewish sounding name, "Saul Goodman", as an angle.

The scene also featured a cameo from James Urbaniak. whom you may know as Doctor Venture from The Venture Brothers. He gives a pretty funny and subtle performance here as Saul's tour guide at the club. You can see the gears working in his head as he tries to keep up with Saul's grift.

This season's also supposed to see the return of Walter White and Jesse Pinkman. I hope their presence is worked in organically.

The first episode of this season notably didn't begin with a "flash forward" of Saul's life post-Breaking Bad as the show has routinely done in previous seasons. I hope this means there'll be a time shift to the present this season. Bob Odenkirk doesn't resemble his younger self much at all anymore so it's gotten a bit awkward watching him play younger. It's too bad de-aging technology hasn't gotten flawless and cheap. Anyway, he's still giving a good performance and if 50 year old men can play Romeo surely Odenkirk can play Saul.

Better Call Saul is available on Netflix.

Saul Gets the Job Done

Kim and Jimmy each did their separate things to save Huell in Monday's new Better Call Saul, resulting in an entertaining if somewhat implausible episode. Nacho's story continues to have nothing worth mentioning while Mike's was almost interesting. But, as usual, Saul is the reason for watching.

Spoilers after the screenshot

At what must be some considerable expense, Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) buys a bunch of greeting cards, goes to Louisiana to ride around Huell's home town, and pays people on the bus to write heartfelt messages. Then he sets up a bunch of drop phones, brings in the student film crew, and sets up a phoney community web site for Huell. And miraculously it all works and fools the D.A.

Meanwhile, Kim (Rhea Seehorn) works her more credible magic, intimidating the D.A. with a group of assistants. Jimmy politely downplays his role but Kim knows its because of his shenanigans justice was served for Huell. And in a satisfying if somewhat cliche dramatic turn, the experience belays and reverses her drift away from him and we get one of those dramatic, sudden kisses, the kind I don't think we'll be seeing guys give on television again for a very long time.

Was it justice for Huell that turned Kim on, though? The danger? Or just the cool efficacy of it all? The episode ends with her surprising Jimmy by telling him she wants to do something like this again; I suspect it has something to do with the idea she shot down at the Mesa Verde conference in an earlier scene. This isn't completely out of the blue--obviously Kim has diverged a great deal from Jimmy at this point but there was a time when she played along with some minor cons at the beginning of season 2. Now she's in a much more respectable position so maybe the desire to rebel is even stronger.

At bottom, I think Kim is tempted by the idea of getting things done faster and better than anyone else, even if it means taking risks. That could be the ultimate lesson from her car accident.

In standard plot trajectory, if you're going to break up two characters, you make them seem to suddenly get fabulously back together first. So here's what I think's going to happen in the last two episodes, between some Mike and Nacho padding: Jimmy's going to try some kind of scheme to help with the Mesa Verde thing; it fails spectacularly; Kim takes all the blame so Jimmy can safely get his law licence back but then she walks away from him. She'll say something about how he's her addiction or he enables some addiction of hers--for reckless efficacy--and how, for her own mental health, she has to stay away from him. This finally turns Jimmy into Saul because the loss of Kim makes him decide there's no reason to hold onto his soul anymore.

I'm not sure if I want to be right nor not. We'll see.

Better Call Robert Forster

Better Call Saul was under the long shadow of Breaking Bad in Monday's new episode, much of the story having to do with protracted setup for events from that series. But there were some nice character moments to remind us that Better Call Saul has some of its own blood in its veins.

Spoilers after the screenshot

Some of the best moments on Better Call Saul have been watching Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) pull scams. Watching him compulsively hustling in his job as a cell phone salesman has some of that pleasure. When he and Kim (Rhea Seehorn) talk about Jimmy getting mugged by kids and he gets a funny look in his eye when he says they wouldn't have dared "roll" him when he was one of them, the transition to talking about getting him a shrink almost felt like getting a therapist to cure Jimmy of who he really is. Like Breaking Bad, this show isn't afraid to discuss the sense of personal liberation that might come with criminality.

I'm pretty sure one of the kids who mugged Jimmy is the one Kim managed to save from a harsh sentence in an earlier courtroom scene. I wonder if that's going to come back to haunt the two of them.

It seems Kim is starting to feel pulled between two applications of her job as she chooses to stick with the nervous young woman instead of attending to an emergency at her cushy Mesa Verde job. As Jimmy is compulsively drawn to crooked behaviour, Kim is compulsively drawn to being a heroine.

Meanwhile, in a mildly interesting couple of scenes, Mike (Jonathan Banks) vets criminal contractors for the job of making the underground facility Walter White will eventually use. Whoopee.

For the real Breaking Bad tie in, though, the episode began with a scene set during the events of that series with Saul wearing the same outfit and bearing the same wounds we see in the last season of Breaking Bad. Though Odenkirk's noticeably older in the prequel.

He was so much older then, he's younger than that now.

What was the purpose to Better Call Saul's narrative of the flash forward? He hands Francesca (Tina Parker) a card for a lawyer. Is that lawyer Kim? Or maybe Howard (Patrick Fabian)? I liked the darkly funny scene in the new episode where Jimmy runs into a dishevelled Howard in the restroom, complaining about insomnia. When Howard tells Jimmy his shrink has been working "great" you can't really blame Jimmy for then flushing the number Kim gave him for a psychiatrist down the toilet. Does Jimmy really have any good choices? That's a good noir kind of question.

Dreams of the Odd Office Cowboy

Is Kim turning into Dougie? I couldn't help thinking the moment where Kim, in last night's new Better Call Saul, spaced out staring at the weird cowboy office art was a lot like Kyle MacLachlan doing the same thing in last year's season of Twin Peaks.

Filming for this season of Better Call Saul started in January 2018 so it's entirely possible this was an intentional reference. It was a good episode, in any case, at least when it was focusing on Kim (Rhea Seehorn) or Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk). The stuff in the world of drug dealing tends to feel like pointless, unnecessary elaboration on back story established well enough in Breaking Bad.

Spoilers after the screenshot

Certainly a lot of effort went into making the first scene exciting with Nacho (Michael Mando) going the distance to make it look like he hadn't betrayed the Salamancas, including letting himself get shot in the shoulder and the gut. It's all very meticulously put together and you get the sense of the deep hole Nacho's getting into but he's . . . just so dull. I guess he's roughly the equivalent of Jesse on Breaking Bad and it's easy to imagine how much more interesting this scene would have been with Jesse in Mando's place. Jesse was a character established as someone with more layers; his ignorance was played for laughs sometimes but it could also be tragic. The intensity of Aaron Paul's performance went a long way, too. Mando is just Default Guy all the time.

Another Breaking Bad character is introduced, Gale (David Costabile), and it's kind of nice seeing him again. But the whole point of the scene introducing him just seems to be that he's being introduced. I didn't care.

I love Jimmy putting all his energy into getting some porcelain figurine and the guy having to sleep in his office because his wife kicked him out was a great funny but credible touch. Jimmy's idea to use a car alarm to distract him is one of those nice little practical ideas, somehow much more fascinating than the elaborate set up for Nacho at the beginning. It's in the fullness of the details, the idiosyncrasies of the characters.

I wonder what is happening with Kim. I remember last season had her building up into a hyper stressed state before ending with that car accident. Now seeing her wandering around those strange, ugly model houses, the keyboard music rising over the dialogue to help convey her disconnect; I guess she could be feeling a combination of burn out and depression. The final scene, where she finally starts to deal with the details of the meeting about Chuck, is almost the opposite of the scene from the end of the previous episode. Where that scene had led to a deeper connexion between Kim and Jimmy, now they seem divided. Jimmy's got his emotions walled off and she's feeling them more heavily. Of course, she still hasn't told him Chuck committed suicide so maybe she's tormented by what she instinctively thinks will occur when he finds out. Maybe it's healthier for him to think Chuck was secure in hating him right to the end.

Better Call Kim

In last night's new Better Call Saul the MVP was definitely Kim. But the nice new episode had other good scenes having to do with Jimmy though all the drug dealing business still feels like a screensaver.

Spoilers after the screenshot

I can't get myself invested in the Nacho (Michael Mando) plot. I appreciate all the trouble the show goes to to establish his father as this guy who can't countenance his son's business and the attempt at quiet tension in that garage scene where the old man refuses the ill-gotten cash without a word. There's ambition there leaping out of the water but it just falls back in the drink. I guess the actors are okay, the sound design is pretty boring. Maybe it's the latter that leads to the flat feeling of so many scenes of people just hanging around. Though primarily I'd say it's that the characters aren't complex enough.

They suffer by comparison to the Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) plot. The scene where he interviews at the Neff company--nice Double Indemnity reference--is dazzling, first with Jimmy demonstrating his not surprising knowledge of copiers, then in the subtle dialogue where he manoeuvres around discussing why he stopped being a lawyer to make it sound like a really good thing. When the guy says, "What happened?" the response we might expect is, "I'm prohibited from practising for a period but I can assure you my character is . . ." etc, etc. Instead, Jimmy deliberately mischaracterises the motive of the question in a plausible way--he acts like the guy's asking because he doesn't know how useful a lawyer could be in sales. I believed every moment of it, too: Bob Odenkirk sold Jimmy's salesmanship perfectly. And I believed when he sabotaged himself at the end with a misapplication of righteousness.

It's almost like his brother possessed him, a deranged moment of conscience, where Jimmy was right at what he had to know was the wrong time. It's a moment that makes clear the moral tightrope Jimmy compulsively walks, the kind of self flagellation that'll make his inevitable turn feel very credible.

But as I said, this episode goes to Kim (Rhea Seehorn), and not just because I'm impressed her sling matches her blouse. Her confrontation with Howard (Patrick Fabian) was great for two character revelations--of course she's right about Howard, it was selfish of him to tell Jimmy about Chuck's suicide at that moment, but Howard himself probably was unaware of how selfish he was being. He clearly feels even worse than he did before.

The other great revelation in the scene is in how much it shows Kim really loves Jimmy. She is so keyed into him, accurately understanding his feelings and willing to cast his motives in the best possible light, she has no hesitation in going passionately to bat for him.

And this leads to one of the best kisses I've seen on television. When the two are sitting down to watch White Heat neither of them brings up the meeting. But from how they look at each other we know they're both thinking about it. The mildly plaintive look on Jimmy's face is met with just exactly the reassurance he needs in Kim's--we can see, with all the dialogue being about the remote control and Jaws 3D, he knows she went to bat for him and she knows he needed it and they're both aware of just how far she's willing to go to be supportive of him. It's a brilliant, intensely sweet scene. It makes the anxiety of wondering what happened to Kim between now and Breaking Bad all the more poignant, too.

Twitter Sonnet #1144

Remembered cola fills another glass.
Ascending bubbles break another roof.
Descending droppers feed an empty class.
Enlisting void asserts a logic hoof.
A yellow town was buried 'neath the gold.
Refreshments came at cost of salty wells.
Increasing ages never do get old.
A desert spring's but one of many tells.
Inside a cellar stockings fume for ink.
Beside reflections solid matter stood.
Across a line of light's a solar link.
The smaller maybe serves the greater good.
Misplaced and silent kept behind the shield.
Belief in single crops reduced the yield.

The Return of Saul

Last night's première of Better Call Saul's fourth season was a lot like the third season première--not a lot of dialogue, not a lot of plot, just the feeling of a stage being set. Sometimes I like this deliberate slow down, sometimes it does feel stretched a bit too thin.

Spoilers after the screenshot

Once again I feel like the makers of the show overestimate how interesting Mike (Jonathan Banks) is. In this episode we see that Mike quits his job at a toll booth, plays with his granddaughter while she gardens, gets a cheque from Madrigal, then goes in and infiltrates their front company like he really is a security consultant. And that's it. I like the idea of a procedural and I like what it says about Mike's worth ethic that he just can't sit still with the ten grand--he's more comfortable doing the job. But I don't know that we needed to see Mike slowly leaving the toll booth for the last time, giving up his windbreaker--I don't know that we needed to spend so much time watching Mike prowling the offices with a clipboard.

Maybe I'm a hypocrite for loving all the slow burn stuff on the new season of Twin Peaks but it seemed like Lynch's silent spaces are so much fuller. Even the long sequence of the guy sweeping the floor at the Roadhouse. Oddly the fact that it was essentially pointless makes it seem like it had more of a point to it than Mike going through the trash in the warehouse.

The scenes with Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) were better. That opening sequence set in the present day did a great job playing with suspense, showing just how precarious his life is now. He may be wearing a big moustache but he used to be on TV--running into anyone from Albuquerque has a chance of blowing his cover. So that long stare from the cab driver was filled with tension.

I'm a little worried the show won't pick up the slack in the absence of Chuck, though. The drama between the McGill brothers was amazing and vastly overshadowed everything else in the previous seasons. They're almost going to have to start from scratch. But I did think the final scene was great where Howard (Patrick Fabian) revealed he does have a conscience and breaks down over what he did to Chuck. Jimmy, completely callous, letting him keep that guilt, is both completely nasty and completely understandable after all he's been through on top of his brother's death knocking him off balance. So I do think the writers could be on to something.