Black Sheep does TV: BOARDWALK EMPIRE Season 2

Wow. That was all I could say when the second season of HBO's BOARDWALK EMPIRE concluded. In fact, I think I may have said it about ten times in succession and then just stared blankly at the screen for a good minute before I had to accept it was over. In just 12 episodes, this series is able to execute satisfying and shocking storylines for a dozen plus characters, taking you to places so dark and corrupt, you wonder if your innocent, little psyche will make it out unscathed. This second season proves without any doubt that the first was not a fluke and that they aren't afraid to do anything if it will serve the story.

If the first season of BOARDWALK EMPIRE was about establishing Nucky Thompson (Steve Buscemi) as the king of the boardwalk, then the second season is about consistently chopping him down at the knees to see if he can still get up and walk. Nucky finds himself the subject of a criminal investigation for election tampering (which he is guilty of), which develops into a much bigger case that includes the murder of his girlfriend, Margaret Schroeder's (Kelly McDonald), husband (which he is also guilty of). If that weren't enough, he is also trying to maintain his status as the big man in town whilst Jimmy Darmody (Michael Pitt), the boy he raised as his own, tries to take that position for himself, and quite forcefully at that. The bootlegging continues but there is a turf war that goes all season long and stretches from New York to Philadelphia by the time it has played out.

Under the direction of series regulars, like Timothy Van Patten and Jeremy Podeswa, the second season of BOARDWALK EMPIRE is a breathtaking juggling act. There are so many balls in the air sometimes, it's a miracle that not a single one of them ever drops to the floor. And with significant characters being killed and Nucky's home life fighting for more of his devotion before it concludes, I cannot wait to see where all the excitement will lead next.

BOARDWALK EMPIRE Season 2 is available on DVD and Blu-ray now. The 3rd season begins on September 16, on HBO.

Black Sheep Interviews Mark Andrews

PIXAR, THE BRAVE.
An interview with BRAVE director, Mark Andrews

Who would have ever thought that the studio who brought you rats in kitchens, robots in space and monsters in closets would be considered brave for telling a princess story? Yet, here we are. Pixar Animation Studios is set to release their 13th feature length animated film, BRAVE, this month, and all anyone can seem to focus on is the fact that for the first time in Pixar history, the protagonist is a girl.

“It is weird,” BRAVE director, Mark Andrews, tells me when I ask him if the attention his main character’s gender is garnering, is at all strange to him. “It’s not like we have a big dry erase board that says, ‘Pixar films until 2025: Girl picture, giraffe picture, something in Saudi Arabia!’ If we focused on that aspect, on marketing, on what we haven’t done, then we would be playing to that instead of playing to the strengths of the character and the story.”

These particular strengths are what Pixar has come to be known for and this can be at least in part attributed to their incredibly organic attention to detail. “We are more focused on building something from the ground up instead of hitting some bar or some expectation,” Andrews tells me of the Pixar philosophy, when we meet at Toronto’s Casa Loma, during the BRAVE press tour. “We’re still very much in the canon of Pixar, which is to say you’re going to get something where you don’t really know what to expect, but trust us, its gonna be good.”

The film had just screened, to great fanfare, for Toronto audiences the night before. Naturally, Andrews wore a kilt to the event. In what is now a great Pixar tradition, a number of the film’s animators, along with Andrews, spent a couple of weeks in and around the highlands of Scotland to take in the scenery. Andrews considers this research pilgrimage to be invaluable if you want to get out of your head. “You have to go, you have to touch everything to get here,” Andrews motions toward his heart at this point. “And once I get here, then I can get it on to a page or into a painting or tell somebody else about it because I can give them these details to hold on to. You get to the character of it all.”

Andrews, hard at work

The character everyone is talking about is Merida, a red-haired fireball of a character, as bullheaded as she is fearless and forward thinking. Not only is Merida, voiced in the film by BOARDWALK EMPIRE's Kelly McDonald, the first Pixar girl but she’s also a princess at that. “Disney’s done the princess, y’know, a lot,” Andrews jokes boisterously. “We knew we had a princess. It serves the story and raises the stakes but we knew we were making an anti-princess. She’s everything a princess is not.”

Taking on a princess in a long line of princesses, while still making sure to make the character modern and relatable to today’s crowd, meant tweaking the formula a little. “Being a princess and being a woman are very different things. It’s not this old adage that you have to be saved, that you have to fall in love to be complete,” Andrews states with the pride of a father. “Merida’s not questing for happily ever after. She’s discovering who she is and how she fits into this world, on her own terms.”

Merida marches to her own beat

And so even though I began all of this by pointing out how odd it is that there is so much focus on Pixar first’s in BRAVE (add first fairy tale and period piece to the list while you’re at it), as opposed to the film itself, Andrews is happy for the attention nonetheless. “I kinda like that everyone is gravitating to the specifics about the film so that when they see it, they’re going to see it’s so much more than just a picture about a girl.”

BOARDWALK EMPIRE

HBO has a reputation for producing quality, cinematic television and BOARDWALK EMPIRE is a perfect example of this. Set in Atlantic City during the prohibition era, the show focuses around the city treasurer, one Enoch "Nucky" Thompson, played with great weight and resolve by Steve Buscemi. Often relegated to showy, albeit still mere, character roles, it is incredible to see Buscemi take the lead in this series and to see him do so with such impressive strength. He leads an ensemble made up of actors who are often not given their due, from Michael Pitt and Michael Shannon to Kelly McDonald and Michael Stuhlbarg. Altogether, they make up one of the most dynamic and effective ensembles on television today.

The first season, now available to rent or own on either DVD or Blu-ray, consists of twelve addictive installments. The series itself was created by Terence Winter, one of the main writers on another HBO gem, THE SOPRANOS, but the pilot episode itself, which reportedly cost $18 million to make, was directed by none other than Martin Scorsese. Scorsese, who also serves alongside Mark Wahlberg as an executive producer, is the Godfather of gangster cinema (sorry, Francis) and his gravitas anchors the series from the very beginning, allowing it to go to places that are often shocking and moving. The first season, based on the Nelson Johnson novel, Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times and Corruption of Atlantic City, follows Nucky as he gets his bootlegging business off the ground, falls for a recent widow (McDonald) and struggles to ensure the Republican party, the one he controls from behind the scenes, remains in power. It is at times uncanny how some of the issues people wrestled with then are still prominent today.

BOARDWALK EMPIRE presents the golden age of gangstering and it does so with such class and subtlety that it burns directly into your mind, leaving you wanting to get back to that boardwalk as often as possible. If more television series took as much care with their stories and characters as this one does, I think its fair to say I would have a lot less free time on my hands.