Jack Ryan 3: On the Edge of Your Seat, In a World Both Better and Worse than Ours

I binged the third season of Jack Ryan on Amazon Prime Video -- and let me say how good it is to binge rather than watch a TV series on the old-fashioned weekly basis -- and also say that I thought this was the best of three new Jack Ryan screen forays.  Which is to say, I thought the action was great, the plot complex and surprising and even profound at times, and the overall narrative excellent.

[Spoilers ahead ... ]

The enemy is a Russia quite familiar to us.  Luka (a very major character, very well played by James Cosmo) laments that, in Russia, "We don't build things anymore, we build lies."  This is a tragically apt description of Putin.  And the villain (not Luka) yearns and is working for a restoration of the Soviet Union.  But though there's a fleeting, unclear reference to Ukraine, it soon becomes clear that Ryan is dealing with a very different kind of Russia than we all are dealing with off-screen.

In fact, in Jack Ryan 3, the man in charge seems more like Gorbachev, and it's the young Defense Minister who would start World War III if that would enable the return of the Soviet Union.  There are good and bad players and in between on both sides of this escalating tension, in Russia, the U.S., and central Europe, where most of the action takes place.  More than enough to keep you guessing, and they are all well played.

My favorites, in addition to Luka, are Wendell Pierce back as James Greer (who hasn't "been in Moscow many times"), Michael Kelly as Mike November (great name, and at least a dozen or more prime wisecracks), Nina Hoss as Alena Kovac (President of the Czech Republic), and Peter Guinness as Petr her father. There've been a long line of Jack Ryans on screen, going back to Alec Baldwin, and proceeding to Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck, and Chris Pine.  At this point, John Krasinski is at least as good as Pine, which is high praise.

Considering the shape our world is currently in, seeing what Jack Ryan has to contend with -- no Putin in power, no COVID -- is almost a relief.  But Jack Ryan 3 manages to make the end of the world seem more harrowingly at hand.  It keeps you on the edge of your seat and the series in top form.

See also Jack Ryan on Amazon Prime: Right Up There ... Jack Ryan 2: Fascism Loses -- At Least, In This Story

Jack Ryan on Amazon Prime: Right Up There

You've got to give Amazon credit, doing a new, rebooted Jack Ryan series, starring John Krasinski in the title role, after the likes of Harrison Ford, Alex Baldwin, Ben Affleck had knocked the role out the ballpark - well, certainly Harrison Ford - in a series of riveting movies from 1984 through 1996.  Sort of like what Amazon attempted when it brought Philip K. Dick's alternate history masterpiece novel The Man in the High Castle to the streaming television series screen with little-known actors.   And with the same result: both succeeded splendidly.

I haven't read any of Tom Clancy's novels, which I think is actually good when judging a movie or a television series based on the novels, because it allows appreciation of the movie or TV series on its own terms.   And my wife and I, binge-watching the eight Jack Ryan episodes in just two nights, really enjoyed this first season of this classic American spy-action story.

The trapping are familiar and updated - ISIS in Syria, attacking a church in Paris, and before the end of these episodes, bringing the fight to the U. S. homeland, with an ebola virus and a dirty bomb designed to wreak havoc.   But although this new Jack Ryan is reminiscent of both Jack Bauer and Homeland, with some Doron from Fauda thrown in, it has a pace and a heart all its own.

Jack is determined to not only save the day but do the right thing - as in trying to come through for the people around him on his commitments - for not only his friends but relative innocents caught up in the struggle.  His immediate boss, James Greer, is played by Wendell Pierce, who gives the best performance of his long career since The Wire.  Abbie Cornish is good as Dr. Cathy Mueller, who we know in a subsequent story will become Cathy Ryan or Mrs. Jack Ryan (Jack, by the way, is a Dr., too - a PhD in economics).  Ali Suliman as Suleiman is scathing, sensitive, and memorable as the terrorist mastermind.

There's humor, surprises, interludes of non-stop action and deaths - expected and unexpected - in just about every episode.  I'm ready for the second season, which I'll review here as soon as it's up on Amazon.

The Cast of The Wire at the Paley Center

Here is a video of a panel that took place the other day at the Paley Center for Media in New York City.  The panel featured prominent cast members from The Wire.  At a little over an hour, this is the best panel I've ever seen - in this case, online - but also in person.



Watching this also cemented my view that The Wire is the single best show ever to have been on television.   I don't say that lightly - in their own ways, The Sopranos, 24, Breaking Bad, other shows including and even Lost in its good moments were superb.   But none quite compare to The Wire, for reasons that become clear, I think, in this panel discussion.  The only proviso is that the panel is replete with spoilers.  So, if you haven't seen The Wire - all five seasons - don't look at this panel video until after you do.

Part of the pleasure of watching this panel is thinking about how all of these stars first became known to me on The Wire, and have gone on to the other memorable roles.  But every time I see one of them, I say to my wife, hey, that guy was on The Wire ... Wendell Pierce in Treme and Ray Donovan, Michael Kenneth Williams in Boardwalk Empire, Lance Reddick (who wasn't on the panel, alas) on Fringe, Dominic West (also not on the panel) in The Affair, Chad Coleman (also not on the panel) in The Walking Dead, and Idris Elba in Luther and great movies such as Long Walk to Freedom, for which he deserved an Oscar but wasn't even nominated.   The list goes on and on - making The Wire a veritable directory of great actors in dozens of shows since then.  The Wire has seeded television with superb acting for almost a decade now.

My reviews of last season of The Wire, usually written shortly after the episodes were aired for the first time, follow ...

The Wire's Back! Review of Season 5 Episode 1 and Episode 2: The Great, Dangling Conversation ... 3. McNulty and Marlo ... 4. One Down ...5. Media Chasing Their Own Tales and Tails ... 6. Superman Omar and Tall Stories ... 7. King of Diamonds ... 8. Two Down ... 9. Cold, Killer Sweetheart ... The Wire Bows Out Gracefully: Kudos to the Cast and David Simon, the Charles Dickens of Television

See also this earlier Looking Back at the Wire

Two podcast episodes about The Wire -


    The Wire without Stringer        |   The Wire Season 4

Treme 2.2: Bounce and Jazz

Bounce gets Davis bounced from his job in Treme 2.2 (sorry, couldn't resist) - he defies the station director's order to mix it up - play rock 'n' roll,  etc on his radio show - and gets fired as a result.  I like bounce enough, but love rock 'n' roll et al  a little more - so I'm not unsympathetic to the station director.  And music from Louis Armstrong to Fats Domino to the Nevilles - call it jazz, soul, r&b, rock 'n' roll, whatever - typifies New Orleans as much as bounce, maybe more.   But, still, I hate to see Davis lose this job.

Jazz also won't earn anyone much money, as Delmond makes clear to DJ Jeffy Jeff who will soon be Davis' erstwhile colleague at WWOZ.   Delmond plays some music, live, for his father, Albert, who for some reason doesn't want to hear it.  The tensions continue to run deep between those two.

Crime continues to run higher than last year on Treme.   This time, Sonny gets his kitty robbed from right under him, leading him to muse that he has to stop playing on the street.  (New York's not immune to it either - Janette gets robbed by her one-night stand  - but New Orleans is especially vulnerable.)  Terry's doing his best to get his police to focus on real crimes rather than moral issues - leading to one of the best scenes in the episode, as an officer defends his arrest of a guy with his pants so low you could see "his crack" - but the tide is clearly rising against Terry's efforts.

Terry has Thanksgiving dinner alone at the station, and these dinners serve as a bitter-sweet tableau of where most of our characters are on this day.   Toni and Sofia have a sad dinner out - sadder even than Terry's - but Annie's having a good time with Davis' family (even if he isn't), Ladonna's having a warm family gathering, and Antoine and his new family are doing just fine.

Back to the music, it's good to hear Antoine singing as well as playing - Wendell Pierce is sounding pretty good - as he slowly puts together his own band.   And Frogman Henry croaks "Ain't Got No Home" under the closing credits ... ooo-ooo oooah ...  I've been loving that song since the 1950s...

Listen to a little of Clarence "Frogman" Henry right here!


5-min podcast review of Treme


See also Treme Is Back!

And also Treme! ... Treme 1.2: "If you ain't been to heaven" ... Treme 1.3: Fine Sweet and Sour ... Treme 1.4: New Orleans, New York, Nashville ... Treme 1.5: Delicious! ... Treme 1.8: Passions and Dreams ... Treme 1.9: Creighton ... Treme Season One Finale: Happy Sad Life

And: My Favorite Moment in Treme (Season One)

---

                 Special Discount Coupons for Angie's List, Avis, Budget Car, Garden.com, eMusic

---

---

The Plot to Save Socrates


"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

---

Enjoy listening to audio books? Get a free audio book copy of The Plot to Save Socrates - or any one of 85,000 other titles - with a 14-day trial membership at Audible.com ...

Treme 1.4: New Orleans, New York, and Nashville

Well, this time my favorite number in the music-rich Treme - episode 1.4 - was none other than Antoine (Wendell Pierce) singing his own lyrics to St. James Infirmary as he waited to see a doctor after the beating he received by New Orleans' worst (i.e., out of control police) last week.   It was a great example, in one fine scene, of the role music plays in all of New Orleans:  always in the air, ever ready to break through, providing an invitation to zest that can buck and surmount the dreary conditions,

Prof. Creighton displays another way - putting up a YouTube video that tells the world exactly what he thinks of the way New Orleans is being mistreated, in appropriate salty language.  The YouTube interface looked a little newer than what they had in December 2006, but the impact the video had - making Creighton a minor celebrity in town, as people on the street recognize him from the video - was right on.

Lots of true love percolating in this episode of Treme - some of it running less smooth than others.  Sonny is tempted and talked in going to Houston for a gig that proves far less than he'd expected.   And this pulls him away from Annie, who's superbly playing her fiddle (so far, that's all) with another group that happens to include Steve Earle and his son Townes.   But Albert is invited to Lulu's for dinner, and it's clear that those two are headed for the right place and the right time.

Back in New York City - which plays the role of the alter-city to New Orleans in Treme - Delmond attends a fancy party famously peopled by Stanley Crouch and others.   It occurred to me, as I was watching this scene, that Treme has a Robert Altman-esque quality, certainly as seen in Altman's 1975 movie, Nashville, which also had a mix of music and celebrity stirred through the story.

Note added 7 May 2010: And some tragic parallels to the devastation brought by flooding in Nashville right now.


6-min podcast review of Treme

See also Treme! ... Treme 1.2: "If you ain't been to heaven" ... Treme 1.3: Fine Sweet and Sour

---

Special Discount Coupons for Angie's List, Avis, Budget Car, eHarmony, eMusic

---

---

The Plot to Save Socrates

"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

Treme 1.3: Fine Sweet and Sour

A mixed bag for Antoine tonight on Treme 1.3.  Starts out good, with sex with a woman from the club where he plays trombone, followed with sex with his woman at home.   But it ends with vicious cops kicking his trombone and beating him bloody.   Toni explains in another context that cops are on edge in post-Katrina New Orleans, but the truth is this happens all too often in cities around America, which haven't been flooded by a hurricane.

One restraint on police brutality, which I talk about in New New Media, is the ubiquity of camera phone videos and their easy upload to YouTube.   Whether criminal or out-of-control cop, it's getting increasingly harder to break the law in private.   I didn't see any cameras around when Antoine was beaten, but it was good to see Creighton watching a video his daughter made in Baton Rouge put on YouTube.   It's the end of 2006 - YouTube is bursting on to the scene.  (I put my first videos up there in July 2006.)

Sonny and Annie have a strong sweet-and-sour story tonight, too.  It's Annie's birthday.  Sonny gets money to buy her a fine bottle of wine to celebrate.   But real-life New Orleans pianist Tim McDermott swoops in to get Annie to play her violin at an upscale gig with him.   Sonny's welcome to tag along as a guest - keyboard, after all, is "already covered" - and Sonny's left drinking the wine at a table by himself.

Antoine also sings a great song, out in the street, with Sonny and Annie playing, right before his run-in with the cops.   Sounded to me like Wendell Pierce was singing, and it sure was good.   Throw in a little Dr. John music - on record and in a recording session in New York - and Davis and Janette taking each other's clothes off again, and you have a third straight fine episode of Treme.

See also Treme! ... Treme 1.2: "If you ain't been to heaven"


5-min podcast review of Treme

---

Special Discount Coupons for Angie's List, Avis, Budget Car, eHarmony, eMusic

---

---

The Plot to Save Socrates

"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

S

Treme!

Seeing as how The Wire was one of the best shows ever on television, I figured I'd give Treme a chance.  It's another creation of David Simon, who did The Wire.   It has even has Wendell Pierce and Clarke Peters from The Wire (Bunk and Freamon), and lot of other incandescent talent (Melissa Leo, John Goodman, Khandi Alexander, more) and New Orleans music.   It debuted on HBO tonight.  I loved it.

The story starts in New Orleans, three months after Katrina.   What The Wire did for Baltimore, Treme does for New Orleans, more specifically, one particular part of it, Treme.  The details, the colors, and, most of all, the musical performances, are true and stunning.

Pierce plays Antoine Batiste, a trombone player.   He's constantly short-changing cabbies - promising to pay them someday, in one case, leaving his "bone" as collateral (in that case, he gets a gig from Kermit Ruffins, playing himself, the real musician, and pays the cabbie back right away).   The music he's part of, ranging from clubs to funeral processions, is just the thing.

Treme is as much about the music as New Orleans, which is only right, since New Orleans is so much about the music.   One of the best scenes, near the close of the first day, has dj Davis McAlary (Steve Zahn) playing Louis Prima's "Buona Sera" under all kinds of action.   The song plays pretty much in its entirety - the kind of thing you might see and hear in a movie, not usually on television.  Prima was born and lived the first part of his career in the 1930s in New Orleans, so his music was especially apt.

McAlary is a wannabe musician as well as a disc jockey.  He breaks into Tower Records, which is pulling out of New Orleans, to get copies of his band's CD, which he left there on consignment.  While he's there, he helps himself to a CD in which he was playing guitar, as well as a CD he says was stolen from his car  (so he's "karmicly" entitled to it).   He's sleeping with restaurant owner Janette Desautel - played by Kim Dickens - seen in Lost, FlashForward, and, most memorably so far as Matt's mother in Friday Night Lights.    But she could be even more memorable in Treme.

Even Elvis Costello's in Treme.   Kermit seems not to know of him, but McAlary certainly does, and is determined to get to better know Costello -  certainly can't hurt McAlary's musical  aspirations.

Goodman's a college prof, married to Melissa Leo, a civil rights attorney.   Each in their own way is fighting for New Orleans - against the media's misreporting, and various official misconduct in the wake of Katrina.

The Wire's realism had strong rays of optimism, but was mostly about the soul-lacerating, dead-end life of Baltimore's drug culture.   Treme's realism is about a city determined to survive what Goodman aptly insists is a "man-made disaster" - a levee system not up to the task.   The people and the music will make this story one of triumph.

And I'll be back here next week with my review of the next episode.


8-min podcast review of Treme

The Wire Season 5 Episode 3: McNulty and Marlo

I saw the third episode of this final season of The Wire as soon as it went On Demand, on HBO. That was Monday. And, once again, I was going to wait until after the regular HBO showing this Sunday to talk about it .... But, hey, here am I, once again, unable to resist posting a review of this superb episode ... So,

DON'T READ ANY FURTHER IF YOU DON'T HAVE ON-DEMAND, UNTIL THIS SUNDAY NIGHT ...

I titled this review McNulty and Marlo - not because the two have anything to do with each other in this episode, but because they both play major, parallel roles...

McNulty has picked up the pro-active make-things-happen and damn-the-consequences approach he played so well in the very first season of The Wire. It's good to see McNulty really on top of his game again.

This time, he's trying to make his colleagues and bosses think there's a serial killer loose in Baltimore - the only way McNulty can think of to keep the cops focused on Marlo and the drug business. The only person wise to what McNulty is doing - because he was there when McNulty started hatching this plan - is Bunk, who is none too happy about it.

In fact, Bunk, as he often does, has one of the best lines in the show - right up there in the entire series - urging McNulty to "think his weak shit through"... (Wendell Pierce as Bunk is just perfect in his delivery.) This in addition to reminding McNulty that they both have families to support...

But McNulty, of course, is not to be stopped. He does manage to get the struggling Baltimore Sun to print a story about a possible serial killer - but it gets buried. (There's all kinds of good stuff about the newspaper in this episode, too, with Clark Johnson's Gus Haynes and other paper staff.) In a great last scene in this thread, Bunk's hoping the level-headed Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters) will get McNulty to see the light, and back off ... and ... Freamon loves McNulty's plan! He just thinks McNulty hasn't gone far enough in making the story big enough to grab some media attention ... Not such weak shit at all ...

Meanwhile, Marlo has much less screen time, but is undergoing a very significant evolution. As Proposition Joe (well played by Robert F. Chew) puts it, Marlo's not easy to "civilize". But Marlo's beginning to get there, as he goes to a tropical island to get money that Prop Joe has expensively cleaned for Marlo. All in the gradual way Marlo is moving not only into Avon's but Stringer's role.

Many other excellent threads in this show, with Michael, Carcetti, Daniels, and more, in what is shaping up to be a really satisfying concluding season, right up there with the very first...

See also The Wire's Back! Review of Season 5 Episode 1 and Episode 2: The Great, Dangling Conversation ... 4. One Down ... 5. Media Chasing Their Own Tales and Tails ... 6. Superman Omar and Tall Stories ... 7. King of Diamonds ... 8. Two Down ... 9. Cold, Killer Sweetheart ... 10. The Wire Bows out Gracefully

---

The Plot to Save Socrates

"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

more about The Plot to Save Socrates...





Read the first chapter of The Plot to Save Socrates .... FREE!