Basket of Kisses

…apparently Chelcie Ross was on Grey’s this week.

He was just as commanding, insinuating, square-peggish. Brilliant. He also looked so much younger.

Hope he’s back next season!

BoK favorite Mark Kelly is in a faboo looking new feature film. And holy crap look at this cast!

When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present by Gail Collins

It’s all there in the subtitle; When Everything Changed is a comprehensive overview of how women’s lives have changed. It opens in 1960, with a woman being kicked out of traffic court (she was there to pay her boss’s fine) because she was wearing slacks. Think the sexism we see in Mad Men is overstated? Holy cow, if anything, it’s underplayed. Journalist Gail Collins takes us on a journey, through news reports, court cases, and personal reminiscences from a great variety of women, that begins in the most deeply institutionalized sexism. From there we travel into the beginnings of the women’s movement, the publication of significant books, the forming of significant organizations, radicalization, schism, backlash, the works. And through it all, those personal stories, keeping it real.

So sometimes, you’ll shake your head and say “Wow.” Other times, you’ll have a memory sparked and say, “Oh, yeah! That’s right!” And late in the book, if you’re media savvy and pay attention to the world around you, you might get bored, because it’s all stuff you read the first time. But the overall effect is outstanding. Reading When Everything Changed from beginning to end offers something like a sense of the massive scope and impact of the women’s movement.

Collins avoids a lot of pitfalls. She doesn’t swallow conventional wisdom about the women’s movement, doesn’t denigrate feminism, but doesn’t overlook flaws in the way people have behaved. My sense, reading her, is of a remarkably smart and fair-minded writer with a deft command of prose.

For Basketcases, there is terrific material here, a wonderful learning experience about our era and what followed. We see young Bettys and Peggys and even Suzannes, and Sallys, and we see them grow up and change. There’s Sally, going off to college and becoming a lesbian separatist, and there’s Betty, understanding, or not understanding, or becoming one herself.

The book marches boldly to the present day, to the 2008 elections, with two major female candidates, but doesn’t pretend that means sexism has gone away. Collins is smart and sees the world clearly, both the progress and the world ahead.

Definitely recommended.

Julie McNiven, aka Hildy, reprises her angelic role on tonight’s episode of Supernatural.

Here she is as Anna; Photo by Sergei Bachlakov via CW Network

Here’s what she sent me:

Tonight at 9pm on CW I do a little ass kicking on “Supernatural”

I know, I know, I heart her too!

Not enough people saw Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, a really good movie with an amazing cast and extraordinary imagery. It opens with Philip Seymour Hoffman and Marisa Tomei (I told you it was a great cast) making wild, uninhibited, practically gruesome love. Soon we learn they’re a married couple on vacation, and this is the kind of sex they only have on vacation. ‘Why can’t we do this when we’re at home?’ Hoffman asks. But they can’t, and soon things spin out of control in this modern noir.

I was reminded of the movie, particularly the opening scene, watching Souvenir. Don and Betty on opposite sides of the bed from the ones they use at home. Nice image, that. Someone said that at this point in the season (episode 8), Don had only made love after being on an airplane: In Baltimore (Out of Town) and now in Rome. The need to get away was palpable; Don was aroused by getting away.

Finally he couldn’t get away at all, and found a lover in the neighborhood. I don’t know what that means, exactly: Is it just giving up? A desperation of loneliness and emptiness? Has he discovered there is no getting away, there’s only, as he said in Out of Town, “going places and ending up somewhere I’ve already been”?

But back to the notion of vacation. What is it that takes us out of ourselves that can’t be brought back home? Why did Hoffman and Tomei make love so passionately, only to go back to hating each other once they returned to New York? Why did Betty hate her souvenir so much?

It’s not how great a vacation can be that piques my interest (man, do I ever love going away), it’s how coming back snaps everything right back into as bad as it ever was. And yeah, been there, done that, too. But it seems so counter-intuitive. Vacation time should be healing and renewing, and sometimes it is, but sometimes, the other side of the bed stays in Rome.

On our Facebook page, a Basketcase asked us to update our Movie References list for Season 3. Great idea! (By the way, all this and more is from our Cultural References.)

Season 3 was less film-centric than in the past, having relatively more references to the news of the day.

Ep 3:01: Out of Town
Lost Weekend

Ep 3:02: Love Among the Ruins
Bye Bye Birdie
Metropolis

Ep 3:03: My Old Kentucky Home
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
La Notte (visual reference in the final shot)

Ep 3:05: The Fog
Bridge on the River Kwai

Ep 3:11: The Gypsy and the Hobo
The Misfits
Casablanca

Ep 3:12: The Grown-Ups
Singin’ in the Rain

While I didn’t find the last season of the SyFy Channel’s Peabody Award winning Battlestar Galactica completely satisfying, I was hooked for its entire run. Like Mad Men, the writing was top-notch and explored complex themes relevent to a contemporary audience. Also (and I say this ducking), as much as I love January Jones, my vote for television’s most sexy blond still goes to Trisha Helfer as the iconic “Number Six.”

Season One of Caprica, a spin-off of Battlestar Galactica, officially started last Friday with a rebroadcast of the pilot episode. A prequel, Caprica is set 58 years before the original show and concerns itself with the events surrounding the creation of a race of machines that will ultimately revolt against their human inventors.

I bring this up because whenever someone unfamiliar with Mad Men tries to describe it, they invariably list the time-period in which it’s set, the clothes worn by the characters and, more often than not, the fact that everyone “smokes all the time.” Interestingly, this description could also apply to Caprica. These generic similiarities even promoted one reviewer to write a piece on the new series titled: “Caprica: Like Mad Men with Robots.”

The comparison is a bit misguided, but understandable.  First of all, like Mad Men, Caprica is set in another time and (arguably) place. Also, consistent with the social mores of where the action occurs, characters in Caprica are typically outfitted in formal attire. Men wear suits, ties, and, in many cases, even hats that could just as easily adorn the head of Don Draper.

One of the most inane criticisms I’ve heard directed at both shows is the complaint that smoking is so freely depicted. In the case of Mad Men, it’s simply a reflection of what lots of people did in the 1960’s. Conversely, Caprica creator Ronald Moore is motivated by unabashed mischievousness. He revels in writing lines of dialog such as where a lead character sitting in a Caprican coffee house pointedly states that he plans to relax and enjoy his cigarette.

Moore addresses this in a 2009 interview about Battlestar Galactica.

Question: People smoke in BATTLESTAR; and of course you’re a smoker. Could you talk about what went into that decision, and what were your most important pros and cons?

Moore: I’m a casual smoker. I smoke in the podcasts for effect. I smoke with actors.

But I’m just not a big fan of the whole antismoking movement. People should get a life and leave people the fuck alone. It’s just for people’s convenience, it’s not really a health hazard that someone’s smoking somewhere near you. I mean, what about a double whopper with cheese, that’s unhealthy. You suck in a lot of fumes from the air, and you’re going on about the fumes from a guy in a bar — get over yourself! So yeah, that was me putting it in people’s faces.

I was born in May of 1961. As of the events of The Grown-Ups, I was exactly 2 1/2 years old (and Roberta was not yet born). My first memory is of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald.

I know this hardly seems believable. In fact, my mother didn’t believe me for years, until one day I described the memory to her in detail: Where I was, where she was, how the apartment was laid out, what I said. And it was all dead-on; she had to admit I really did remember it.

I don’t remember anything else that year. In fact, my first series of connected memories are of the summer of 1964, when we stayed at a cottage in Monroe, NY. I remember a lot about that summer; the beds in the cottage, my older brother’s birthday party, finger-painting, an outfit I loved. But between November 24, 1963, when Ruby shot Oswald, and maybe May of 1964 when I turned 3, there’s nothing. And before November 24, there’s nothing.

But there’s a gunshot right in between.

Here’s what I remember: Somebody shot somebody on TV, and that was different. That was not what you see on TV. It was not fiction. It was not “a show.” It was real. And “this is real” struck me so deeply within that it awakened memory storage. I jumped up and ran into the kitchen and said “Mommy, somebody shot somebody on TV” and Mom ran in to look. I don’t know what she was feeling that day, whether she mournful or focused on her two toddlers or what. Mom’s a politically aware person, follows the news, and always votes Democratic, so I imagine she felt the events of that week quite deeply.

Now, this particular first memory is an oddity for me. A story you can tell people. But watching The Grown-Ups, it was something more. I have to tell you, I had forgotten that Oswald was murdered on the 24th, I had it in my head as the 23rd, so when everyone was gathered in the hotel kitchen watching the news, I thought we were about to see it, and my heart was pounding out of my chest. And then later, they did show it, with Betty watching, and I felt shaky.

Somewhere inside me, that memory is not just an odd story. Somewhere inside me, I am still afraid.

Wow, it’s like Christmas come early!

Both DVD and Blu-ray versions will be available March 23rd. That is really, really early. Typically the disks haven’t hit until about three weeks prior to the new season. We’ll have lots of time to play with the extras; commentaries, pieces on Medgar Evers, the March on Washington, Mad Men Illustrated (featuring Dyna Moe!), and other coolnesses.

Teaser for Mark Kelly’s upcoming film Shadow Play. This is off YouTube; I couldn’t embed the better one on facebook, but check it out (and join the facebook Shadow Play group to support the project).

This is an amazing role for Mark and we’re very excited for him! And check out the cast–Billy Burke, (thump-thump, thump-thump) (that was my heart throbbing for him), Emma Caulfield, Elliott Gould–how fun! Directed by Nick Simon. We will most definitely keep you posted on its release date.