David Mills

David Mills — Time – Spoilers for the final of the first season coming Treme: Treme finished his first season with a finale that mirror many of his driver: huge, wide dynamic deliberately, and about 83-minutes-expansive. She recalled our first encounter with these characters so that both stylistic (another fitting, the sound of a melody that Davis turns in the DJ booth) and thematic (final disappearance, with Albert “play [ing] to that f99king money “with the Treme brass band). So I want to go back to what I wrote about Treme created before, or rather I want to go back to what the late write David Treme rsaid Mills (a few weeks before his death on the series) on the role of funerals in the series and the New Orleans culture (in an interview for the preview function):
Thematically, this is a show about that very thing. It is a city that has been dealt a terrible blow. But this is not outright terrible. These move up and move forward with life, with your spirit intact. And that’s what the cake is the cemetery. The deceased is buried, and now it’s about moving on and the deferral and maintaining community spirit.

Treme manufacturers have made a conscious decision to begin the month after the series of dams broke and flooded the city, killing hundreds and leaving its future uncertain. Yet, over the first season, we experienced the death of several people who were killed by flooding, either directly (the head of Mardi Gras in his house) or indirectly, or figuratively by its consequences ( mentor trombone Albert Daymo and Creighton).

final scene of the season showed us the cake away from the funeral Daymo’s a sequence that range has been honest and loving in his treatment of both characters (LaDonna, leaving the festive music to help support his pain, and Toni , unable to let go of his anger) and music, we have seen that we have the whole season from the street level, not only as abstract art, but as a pillar of the community functioning and life support .

As the line of Cakewalk second came to an end, the camera pulled back, as we have seen the group reach its stopping point at the corner. Treme could cut credit there. Instead, he lingered for another minute, showing off the music and the crowd breaks. The musicians and mourners have disappeared. Friends found them and beat conversation. The second line has become a community of people in the street. Life went on, his injuries and fractures stuck a bit saved by the common experience of music.

Since the beginning of the series, David Simon and company talked about how they wanted to do a show that dramatized the importance of culture in the life of an American city, a goal that would have sounded pretentious, if not impossible either. As you know if you’ve read my posts a week, I sometimes had problems with the way they did. Especially in the middle third of the season, the storytelling can be loose, and those responsible for the issue, apparently unwilling to leave all the facts on the cutting room floor in order to modify it by requiring discussion, not wanting not use the devices, ie Creighton, the “entertainment field-driven, sometimes lost the series in the car. (For me, I think a large part of the plot and Sonny Annie Anthony or interludes with his benefactor Japanese, but I certainly expect your mileage to vary.)

But we must say: There was a huge challenge, creating an hourlong drama about the life and survival in a series that eschewed automatic generators of a conflict of genres like the cop and medical shows, and while not placing the main event engine, Katrina, deliberately offstage. And in the finest of the season, the most transcendent moments like the closing of the second row and some others in this final they actually managed to do: they really, through the stories of relatively ordinary characters we learned to know, has shown that culture was not only something of a city like New Orleans as a proposal to create business tourism, but a holding part of everyday life.

So I am very happy Treme has a second season: he has his voice, his style and his characters, and showed us what he can do when he uses those in the service of compelling stories. So I am very optimistic that, between seasons, the writers and producers can keep what works, bolsters the series’ component of this story and exemplary representation of American life, even better.

One area where the season had almost no problems has been cast, and “I’ll Fly Away” has a fabulous performance of its three central actresses. Khandi Alexander and Kim Dickens every poignant followed by stories they had played the entire season, but it was a special moment for Melissa Leo. For the season, playing go together, to counsel and support of Creighton, Toni has generally played a role in other people’s stories, but his reaction to his suicide attempt after an ephemeral and denial anger hardening showed why you run a actress firepower Leo in the role. His rejection of his requests for burial and the second line of thought-out final terms of its focus on the NOLA life has been a furious slap him across the wall of death, and denial, his sense of betrayal facilitate the staging his death: “He left! He f99king quit! the city cursed by his ass, each of us. Again, one day after another. I can not dance for him. ”

The city is still largely there, and the characters we have followed this exercise. But over the ten episodes, showed how Treme bounce is not easy, they are wounded to varying degrees, and loss of sensation that will never be cured. It is therefore all the more effective as opposed to, say, weaving flashbacks in the series every season the last episode showed us a few minutes before the end, what life was like before Katrina and this they have lost: Anthony to leave her house and car (giving access to all these negotiations cab-ride), Daymo fatally missed a call and shot his way out of town, Creighton pretended to shoot some sort of subsistence to be a Cassandra about the state of dikes, Sonny and Annie enjoying a sweet moment before the rain, and so on.

The words that the character Steve Earle worked with Annie, who has played on the credits: “This city will never wash / This town will never be drowned“-may have been a little on the nose, as a statement of mind Treme, but coming after the ten episodes, it felt won. aa church just is not ultimately a building, but the congregation he meets, he is from New Orleans are not buildings damaged But people who live there. Treme What we showed during the season, is that by making a choice, and re-do it every day, they keep up this city.

But he also showed us that not everyone will make that choice. Creighton chooses River. Janette chooses (for now) in New York. For the rest, if, while the second line to go beyond their grief, they and we can not forget the real things that are lost. They can not wash or drown. But hey will always be marked, somewhere, flooding low watermark.

Now, for the hail of bullets:

* Although I am sad for Janet to leave New Orleans, Kim Dickens or leaving the troop, she said she left to right. Not everyone out of New Orleans, and he needed someone for whom she had lost too much. He also did not sit right with me for a purpose in which Davis suddenly opened his eyes to the magic of the city, when, after all, she was part of the culture of the city for years. But I’m not sure that’s what he finally did, although Davis sees his role as the greatest leader of New Orleans, even to the point of belligerence. He says he tries to convince Janet to say, but if he has matured as a character at all during these months, I’d like to think he is just trying to give a great goodbye.

* One of the things I’d like to see improvement in Treme is a second season meatier work for Wendell Pierce. Pierce played the hell out of the character, when he had the material, but sometimes Antoine felt more functional than intergral as a character. That is, it is partly because there is a music and life of artists, and Pierce did a great job living her agitation, life on the edge (where busting a lip and the loss a paper clip, for existence, may mean ruin). But it is often there to provide a route through some of the major issue of musical cameos, leading to stories like this, where we get to see the jam with the legendary Allen Toussaint, but spends most of the episode in a plot on the comic-relief game away from its profit.

* A couple of excellent scenes worthy Clarke Peters in the final. First, obviously, was the visually stunning of the showdown in the street with the other guild leader (pictured above) which ends with a bump arms and “respect for tradition.” It’s a confusing scene, an alien who may appear to be setting up a street fight, but it turns out that a mutual recognition and tribute to tradition. But there were also the less showy, but thematically similar scene in which his jam with his son, a sweet moment, but one that shows they can not play a few bars without arguing about the abandonment of the young generation tradition. The two scenes aspects of Albert that we saw during the season, his commitment to reforming the Brotherhood to fight an attacker to his protest housing pipe dream: Albert is principled and dedicated, but is also a hard man, may manifest as stubbornness, hostility, and even ugliness. Good on Treme she did not idealize the sand or the rough.

* There may be fans of Sonny and Annie’s story, but I fizzled out roughly where it seemed to be all along: it is just another small guy who can not stand his wife to have more success him, just as it seemed at first. With Annie and Davis appears poised to become a thing now it will be interesting to see if Davis has indeed grown and matured at all, or if it just seems over Sonny.

* And speaking of Davis, now a wholly disposable in the finale, which proved to be steadfast and beautiful, was Davis’s theme song-singer John Boutte serenade with Janette “Bring It On Home to Me . I bet more than a few viewers thought, even before Davis said it sounded like Sam Cooke. To which he replied: “Hell, I like John Boutte! Last perfect words for a show that began in mid-heavy comparisons to The Wire among other things, with passion and tried to look like himself, and take the ineffable way in which New Orleans sounds like himself.