Escape at Dannemora Finale: Why "At"?

Herewith some thoughts on tonight's powerful Escape at Dannemora finale:

1. Michael Imperioli did a great Andrew Cuomo.  Doesn't look all the much like him, but he got the Governor's voice and manner down perfectly.

2.  Matt was indeed a pretty good artist.  The portraits of George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton  that we saw at the end were a lot better than most.  (I like Joel Iskowitz's work better - he's done a lot of my book covers, and is doing the cover for my new album, Welcome Up.  But if JI wasn't available, I might have asked Matt, if he was still alive and not a murderer.)

3. Matt really slowed Sweat down after the escape.  He was at his best, in control and usually comfortably in charge, in prison.  He was at his worst outside of prison, in the real world.

4.  But even on his own, had Sweat made it to Canada, would he have been home free?  The Canadians won't extradite people for whom there might be a death penalty, but there wasn't one awaiting Sweat, so it seems possible, even likely, that they would have extradited him.  Of course, they first would have needed to find him.  (Especially strong work by Paul Dano as Sweat tonight.)

5. Tilly seems to have an almost unbelievable power over men.   Her husband is staying with her, and if that scene near the end, with the new prison guard (or cop) propositioning her is true ... plus the prisoners at Dannemora ... well ...

6. All in all, an unusual and excellent series.  I still don't get though, why it's "Escape at" rather than "Escape from"?   Is that because they didn't succeed in their escape?  Do the results of an escape govern our grammar?

But I enjoyed the mini-series.

See also Escape at Dannemora 1-3: Cold True Crime ... Escape at Dannemora 4: Break Through ... Escape at Dannemora: Out ... Escape at Dannemora 6: Back Stories

 

this cover by Joel Iskowitz ... really

Escape at Dannemora 1-3: Cold True Crime

Tina and I have been watching and enjoying Escape at Dannemora - first three episodes - and I thought I'd check in with a review.

It's a docudrama, based on real events, that occurred when we were up on Cape Cod in June a few years ago.  Prison breaks make for good movies and TV series, especially when they're based on real escapes, and Escape at Dannemora doesn't disappoint.  Richard Matt and David Sweat are the inmates who have nothing to lose, and seduce Tilly Mitchell who works at the prison into having sex with them (at this point, it's not yet a threesome) and helping them escape.  Or, to be more precise, the seduction is sort of mutual, and at first she doesn't know the tools she's smuggling into them are being used to cut through walls.  Matt's a painter, and he tells he needs the tools to make picture frames,

The acting is superb.  Patricia Arquette as Mitchell is different from her usual roles and outstanding. Same for Benicio Del Toro as Matt, who never disappoints. Paul Dano as Sweat is good, too.  What makes the story so compelling is that Matt and Sweat, against all odds, manage to pull of the escape.  That much I remember from the news, and remembering it doesn't weaken watching the series in the slightest.

There's a lot more to be told.  I recall the ending in reality, but not exactly how Matt and Sweat and Mitchell get there.  I'll be watching the rest of this, and the great upstate New York scenery, with great interest.  It's a lot more fun learning about an actual prison break when it's a finely crafted docudrama, rather than seeing it played out on the night news.   I'll see you here next week, and let you know how it goes.

 

Love & Mercy: A Review

Someday a movie about the Beatles may be made that's better than Love & Mercy about Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, but until then Love & Mercy, which I just saw tonight with my wife, is easily the best rock star bio pick ever made.  Hey, it's the best movie about a musician ever made, period, and that's saying a lot, because Amadeus was none too shabby, not to mention the great movies over the years about greats like Ray Charles and Johnny Cash.

Brian Wilson's life is so big it took two stars to portray him - Paul Dano the younger Brian and John Cusack the older Brian - and both were just superb.  Though Dano looks more like the younger Brian than Cusack does the older, the performances of both were peerless, down to the mannerisms, tones of voice, and little ticks of Brian Wilson.  The music similarly was a seamless web with what was going on inside Brian's head and what we the devoted fans were hearing of the Beach Boys on radio and television.  The recording studio scenes were so realistic I felt like calling out to the engineer and asking him to bring up the bass a little more.

The movie is peppered with memorable phrases, delivered like history come to life, that I've both heard before and heard for the first time in this movie.  Jake Abel as Mike Love - another spot on performance - is there to complain to Brian that he can't make sense out of "sunny down snuff" and Van Dyke Park's masterful lyrics to "Heroes and Villains".  That's one I heard before.   But when a studio musician tells Brian that Phil Spector "has nothing" on Brian, that one was new to me, and I was as pleased as Brian in the movie to hear it (and not because I don't love Spector's music - he's a stone genius too - but I because I just love Brian's more).

Elizabeth Banks put in such a compelling and attractive performance as Brian's life-saving Melinda, that Banks instantly rocketed up to my favorite contemporary actress, that's right.  The sensitivity and strength of her performance made it totally believable that Brian fell in love with her, and she figured out a way to cut Brian lose from his baneful, control-freak, suffocating psychiatrist, well played by Paul Giamatti.

To get back the Beatles, the Beach Boys since the 1960s have been my second favorite rock group, way ahead of the Stones, in third place, and I guess, I don't know, the Eagles or the Who after that. Anyway, I don't want to argue about that.  I just want to say how good it was indeed in Love & Mercy, brilliantly directed by Bill Pohlad, to see Brian finally get more of the credit he deserves, not only for his music, but for making it and bringing it back against almost all the odds of his mental demons and most of the people around him.

See also my review of  The Beach Boys in White Plains