MAD MEN on AMC - Seasons 7(a) & & 7(b)

it occurs to me that january jones is the luckiest actress alive

also

http://postimg.org/image/4tkia2ijv/

http://s1.postimg.org/zb0d1m5wv/madmencandy.jpg

mmm Butterfinger.

i'm guessing CLARKs are like a MARS bar?

...and Snik Snak is like a Kit Kat?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpvdYA0fLyY

clark bars are more like butterfinger, i used to buy a bag of mini-clark bars for halloween trick or treaters. pretty tasty. that shot in the new episode made me so damn hungry.

what's a butterfinger

isn't a mars bar a milky way in the States or something?

apparently yes, and a Milky Way is a Three Musketeers in the US

get it together, America

butterfinger = crumbly chunk of hardened peanut buttery stuff. like a softer thicker more peanut-y DIME/DAIM. deelicious.

http://youtu.be/u0rGjmXaVrA

it occurs to me that january jones is the luckiest actress alive

you know I think Jones gets a bad rap and is a better actress than she's given credit. I'd go so far as to say that she's better actress than Christina Hendricks.

I like to think that John Slattery is playing an aspect of himself and it's all natural

It's become unwatchable, but it was neat to see Jones play a modern normie in Last Man on Earth.

agreed!

you know I think Jones gets a bad rap and is a better actress than she's given credit. I'd go so far as to say that she's better actress than Christina Hendricks.

― Darin

I think she does a good job in Mad Men, but she's been shocking in everything else I've seen her in (admittedly not much). No way is she better than Hendricks.

I feel like Hendricks over broadcasts Joan's emotions or something. Maybe I just find her character a bit poorly drawn and uninteresting in comparison with the others. I never really got the cult of Joan thing.

Yeah, I actually like January Jones on LMoE, but she's not enough to keep me watching it.

this is pretty sidesplitting tbh
http://www.clickhole.com/article/oral-history-mad-men-2329

i am the secret man who drinks at work

Yeah, very stupid but I couldn't stop giggling.

Elisabeth Moss (Peggy Olson): Even for scenes he wasn’t in, Jon would burst into whatever room we were filming in and shout, “No, I’m not Don Draper! Don Draper exploded! I’m Dick Whitman instead! Yowza!”

John Slattery: When Jon Hamm says the word “Yowza!” his voice gets extremely low-pitched, like a dragon is talking.

jones seems pretty obviously extremely limited as an actress. that "works" for betty's character half the time, but the other half of the time it really limits scenes. the scenes between her and weiner fils were notably terrible. although i blame a lot of that on the director, whose idea of staging seems to be "have your actors stand stock-still in one place for an entire scene."

i have no idea what christina hendricks is like as an actress elsewhere but she's done some impressive things as joan.

you're right this is all subjective

"have your actors stand stock-still in one place for an entire scene."

there's actually far too much of this in TV in general, as well as Mad Men in particular. actors maintain fixed coordinates throughout a scene. which is not only typically not very "realistic"... more important, it's often not very dynamic.

funny that you brought this up - I thought that scene w/Betty, Sally and Glen really suffered from this in the last episode

yeah, i was beginning to think they were glued to the carpet. i mean, especially given how uncomfortable the encounter was, you'd think at least one of them would be squirming or just fidgeting or something. the only character to move, really, was glen's date, who kind of shrunk back toward the door as the conversation got heated.

What're the odds the final scene of the series is Don throwing himself off a building in a live action version of the title sequence

I'm joking but this episode was all about Don looking to the future and seeing nothing there, so what is there left for this handsome man without character to live for?

Golf

Chicks, money

still time to pine for miss farrell

*sigh*

don should run for office

Then his war record gets investigated

Awkward staging for an awkward moment. Worked for me.

no one investigated war records back then

I think Jones is very good in quite a lot of episodes. I remember hearing that she said she was grateful to Ashton Kutcher for bluntly telling her she was a terrible actress, apparently that was a turning point for her.

lol he should talk

I thought it was kind of eye popping too but I don't think I've ever seen any of his films so I can't really say.

she is fine as betty - never seen her in anything else. but tbh v few people are acting below the chin in this show or any other, or any movie - i don't see the static thing as a sin of matt weiner - truly physical acting is something you p much only see in theatre.

I can't speak for January Jones in anything else, but I think she's mostly excellent as Betty. There have been points along the way where I thought she was the most interesting and complicated character, and--giving them credit for setting that up in the first place--I'm not sure the writers have completely followed up on that.

I agree.

say what you will about ashton kutcher, he seems pretty comfortable in front of the camera, at least in comedies. that's harder than it would seem. jones doesn't usually seem very comfortable, e.g. in that x-men movie. she can't really be blamed, i guess, for not serving as much besides eye candy in that film. but she seems pointedly one-note when called upon to do much more in "mad men." IMO.

and i agree that betty's character as written is often pretty intriguing, a bundle of seeming contradictions that point in interesting directions (if i haven't mixed metaphors too badly). but i don't think the credit for that seeming complexity is due to jones, who has never owned a scene in the way that the character as written could have.

- i don't see the static thing as a sin of matt weiner - truly physical acting is something you p much only see in theatre.

well i'd blame the director of that episode, not weiner. but i think mad men, when it triumphs, is mostly a triumph of art design, writing, and acting... but it typically neglects staging. i think the slattery-directed episodes are exceptions, he seems to be interested in exploring that more than other directors.

it's a broader problem than mad men of course. i think most directors of TV and film these days don't pay a lot of attention to staging.

"What're the odds the final scene of the series is Don throwing himself off a building in a live action version of the title sequence"

that seems to be a common assumption and it's so stupid that if they did that I'd hate the show forever. Nothing about Don reads as suicidal. Maybe he'll drunkenly fall out a window.

I'd be okay if final shot is Draper throwing Harry Crane out a window

i don't think those windows open.

I'd say "Let's assume things are good" is kind of a tell.

last line of the show: whoopsie! aaaaaaahhhh....