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Frostwerks posted:Considering Ziggy couldn't fit into a pringles can I'm not surprise he was always left out. To be fair, not many people could fit into a pringles can. Unless you're making a joke about his massive dong, in which case that was pretty good
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May 14, 2013 00:13
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SpookyLizard posted:Two minor nitpicky corrections: It's magazine, not clip (as far as the wire is concerned, it will always be magazine) and "gum bag" instead of "gym bag". Other than that, another wonderful write up. The whole scene with McNulty in the brothel is sort of depressingly hilarious, because while it's played for laughs and all, if you think about it for more than a minute, it's really depressing. It's a dumb thing to stand out, but I have that exact same gum bag and it weirds me out every time I see it in that episode.
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May 14, 2013 20:34
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SpookyLizard posted:Bodies a real clever cocksucker if gets the chance. He's also the only one on the corner who knows what Entrapment meant. That's one thing I wonder about; if that defense worked for him on the Hamsterdam thing, shouldn't it have worked for everyone else who got busted in it too? Or maybe it did work for everyone, and it was just never a plot point. I don't think they ever really follow up on what happened to the people who got arrested in the Free Zones.
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May 15, 2013 06:05
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SpookyLizard posted:It's been awhile, but he says it in front of McNulty or Kema or someone and they all laugh and end up letting him go. I remember the scene (it's McNulty and Pearlman, I think), I always just wondered why that defense wouldn't work for anybody else who tried it if it worked for Bodie. Even the most overburdened of public defenders would be able to look at a thing like Amsterdam and instantly think "entrapment". I mean, Bodie didn't even know the name for it and he got it. I guess it could just be a matter of McNulty admiring Bodie's gumption and being like "yeah alright we're bros, you can just go," I just can't remember if it was ever really addressed that closely. I just remember that there's a scene later in Season 4 where someone runs into Bodie (Carver or McNulty, I forget which) and mentions something like "there he is, the guy who got off on entrapment". Any lawyer would have been able to think of that, surely.
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May 15, 2013 16:31
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3spades posted:Didn't they pick him up with all the Barksdale crew at the "armory" waiting to strike on Marlo? The big dude who always is used as Muscle tells the police those weapons are his when they bust in. So they round everyone up. Anyone on parole is in violation and serving the rest of their sentence. They only evidence they have on Bodie (assuming the gun charges stick to big man alone) are the pictures/phone they have him doing business in Hamsterdam which he calls entrapment on. I don't know what they had on Poot to sit him out until he's out in S4. I'm pretty sure Bodie wasn't there, he was just rounded up in Hamsterdam when the cops rolled on the Free Zones...maybe I'm misremembering though.
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May 15, 2013 20:22
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Jerusalem posted:Squeak WASN'T there, which is probably why Bernard was You seem to be forgetting one of the funniest lines on the show!
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May 15, 2013 22:47
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SpookyLizard posted:It's entrapment for everyone because the cops told them could sling in hamsterdam and they won't get arrested. I'm not familiar with the specific law in Maryland, but my general understanding of the entrapment defense is that you can use it if you're charged with committing a crime that the cops led you into committing that you otherwise wouldn't have been predisposed to commit (that last part being the trickiest and most relevant part). I am genuinely a little curious how the hamsterdam arrests would have played out in court (not that they would have, the courts don't have enough time in the day for all those arrests), on account of how most of the lieutenants were seasoned drug dealers who obviously would have been dealing drugs anyway...but balanced against the fact that the cops worked their asses off to convince them that the free zones were ok to deal in (after the dealers time and time again tried to turn the offer down), and I just don't know. The scene that Jerusalem posted is the one that throws me; McNulty makes it sound like Bodie's successful entrapment defense was some kind of remarkable exception ("I'm still dining out on that one") when surely it should have been something that every defense lawyer on the hamsterdam cases would have brought up with equal vigor. I'm probably beating a dead horse at this point and I'll drop it (I'm new to the thread and it looks like it's still on Season 2, sorry to derail  ); I think I'll just accept Maxwells Demon's explanation of it, that Bodie gets an extra bump to his defense because Colvin let him go after major crimes busted him carrying the re-up. Bodie even references it in the contrapment scene (I love Pearlman's "are you loving kidding me" face she gives to McNulty after he says "kid's got a point", btw).Or more than that, I prefer to think that it's just the beginning of McNulty and Bodie's tragic Bromance
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May 16, 2013 05:07
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Aces High posted:This brings up one of the couple things that I didn't "get" after finishing the series. I didn't full understand why Bodie did what he did at the end of the fourth season where he got released again and just went to his corner, threw a hissy fit, pulled a gun and got shot dead. Was he just tired of the Game and went out the only way he knew how? Did he have a plan and it just went to poo poo once he saw what had become of his crew? He didn't just throw a hissy fit; what happened was that Monk (one of Marlo's lieutenants) saw him getting into a car with McNulty and assumed he was snitching on Marlo (which, to be fair, he was about to do). They came after him, and instead of going quietly into a vacant like everyone else did, Bodie went down shooting and made them take him down like a soldier. It's a pretty poetic (if sad (if predictable)) end for him; in the beginning of the series, he's all gung ho, beating people down over nothing like a mindless thug, but as the seasons go on he matures and shows more flex, as Stringer would put it. What turns him against Marlo is that Marlo had the kind of needlessly thuggish gangster mentality that Bodie grew out of; killing people over nothing just to wave his dick around ("you want it to be one way; but it's the other way"). And then it gets him killed. quote:The only other thing I didn't get was what happened with the newspaper once we found out that the one guy had been lying the entire time and was outed to the bosses, the one lady got "re-assigned" and the editor got shut down to a lower office while the liar got a Pulitzer for lying for most of the stories he did through the season. Maybe it's a news-media thing that I don't get because I have a very My understanding of that is that the bosses at the newspaper wanted everybody to keep their mouth shut about the lying (even after it came out that it was definitely happening) because if the truth came out, it would cost them their Pulitzer. All the bosses wanted was the Pulitzer so they could go on to do bigger and better things, and if it meant covering up a lie (and crushing everyone who wanted to reveal it), then whatever, the Pulitzer more important than good reporting. Same thing as the serial killer arc; even after it came out that there never was a serial killer, nobody had any interest in revealing the fact because of how much career advancement was riding on it.
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May 16, 2013 06:39
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opinion of most news I hear as it is but just a couple things that didn't make a lot of sense to me
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I think that "We like the little bitches on the chessboard" is one of my favorite lines from the show. Mostly because it's a callback to a scene from 3 seasons ago and it's pretty solid writing that they kept it relevant for so long but also because I just like the wording of it. If I could get away with swearing at work (and trusted my coworkers to get the reference) I'd probably say it all the time.
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May 17, 2013 16:32
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To me, corruption implies some level of self-serving. If Koutris was using the Greeks to make money or fame for himself to the detriment of the job, he'd be corrupt, but I don't think we ever see him do that. As far as we know with the information we're given, he's just a morally gray agent, willing to sacrifice people and do dirty things for the greater good (as determined by FBI protocols, I guess).
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May 18, 2013 20:51
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EvanSchenck posted:
I dunno about that part. The way Fitzhugh reacts when he finds out that Koutris is working in counter-terrorism didn't strike me as "that bastard lied to me," but it was more of a "poo poo, that guy was counter-terrorism, those guys do this shady poo poo all the time" kind of thing. That's the way I read into it anyway; that the counter-terror division in post-9/11 america has carte blanche to jerk the other departments around, and fill them in or keep them in the dark as they see fit. But I could be way off and be reading too much into it.
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May 19, 2013 01:45
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comes along bort posted:Nobody's saying he's a good guy. It's more whether he's enabling the Greeks because he's on the take or because the FBI deems it a necessary evil. I still maintain that it's the latter. It's just more in tune with the themes of the show. Time and again it depicts the FBI as an agency so obsessed with counter-terrorism (or other high-level protocols) that it's willing to turn a blind eye to more run-of-the-mill domestic crimes (sex slavery, "ghetto drug poo poo", and so on). Having a scene where a counter-terrorism agent outright gets a key witness in a drug case killed just to protect his CI in a counter-terrorism case makes sense. And like another poster pointed out, there's precedent for the law enforcement characters on the show turning a blind eye to shady poo poo for what they perceive as the greater good. There's that scene in season one where McNulty, Freamon, and Kima sit Omar down after he murders Stinkum (and they know he did it) and tell him to hang back, then let him loose anyway without a real promise that he's gonna stop murdering people because they need him, and McNulty says "are we still cops, Lester?" It's a funny line, but it seems relevant to what Koutris does too, I suppose. Then again, it's not like there isn't precedent for characters looking out for their own interests over the job (either in the form of outright bribery, or career advancement) so that's possible too. I don't think we get enough information about Koutris' character either way, but I think corruption is too simple of an answer so I choose to believe it's more complicated than that.
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May 19, 2013 05:02
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comes along bort posted:It's interesting that the feds are the most passive of the bureaucrats toward the capriciousness of their superiors' whims. Maybe it's a power thing. I think it could also be a prestige thing. Presumably the FBI is a pretty exclusive workplace; if an agent decides to be a loose cannon, the bosses would have no trouble dropping them because there would be a dozen hungry qualified applicants waiting to take their place. Whereas (from the boss' perspective) a place like the BPD is stuck with the occasional McNulty or Freamon; as much as they buck against the system, good help is hard to find when you aren't willing to pay much for it. I'm indulging in guesswork a little bit here; we don't get to see the insides of the FBI very much, but one of the show's recurring phrases is "one day I wanna work for a real police department, just to see what it's like" (or newspaper, in the case of the Baltimore Sun). I assume that it's easier to rage against the machine when the machine's not running so hot. Ainsley McTree fucked around with this message at 09:04 on May 19, 2013 |
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May 19, 2013 09:01
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escape artist posted:gently caress the clearance. I was wondering about that; I wanted to mention the Landsman/Bubbles scene too but wasn't sure if it's frowned upon to talk about stuff that's far removed from the episode currently being rewatched in the thread, so I kept my mouth shut. But if it is cool to do that, I'm totally gonna do it in the future when I think it would be interesting. Dramatika posted:
I recently re-watched the entire series, and when it got to the part with Bubbles sitting down at the table with his sister I had honest-to-goodness tears rolling down my face. I was not expecting that to happen, seeing as how I knew it was coming but it did! Either this show is more amazing than I realized, or I'm more of a big weepy lady than I realized
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May 19, 2013 23:44
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Yeah, I love that montage too, they picked the perfect song for it. True story; for my first run through this show, I lost track of my progress and accidentally watched the episodes out of order, and watched the beginning of the next episode before realizing that I'd skipped this one. Let's just say it opens with a bit of a spoiler! It's not that bad though; like Jerusalem says in his recap, knowing what's going to happen to Frank makes that last scene all the more hard-hitting.
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May 23, 2013 17:10
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I noticed that too, but I guess I just assumed it was a Baltimore thing or something.
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May 23, 2013 20:37
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Yeah, I don't know if it's fair to say that the Greek has no life outside of his work, we really barely ever follow the man outside of his scenes in the diner. I mean, Stringer Bell was a major character in the show, and it wasn't even until the end of the third season (after he dies) that we even get to see his house. One of the interesting things about this show is that the characters have lives off-screen that carry on without us noticing. Like that scene with Herc, Carver, Dozerman, Bodie, Poot, and their girlfriends at the movie theater.
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May 28, 2013 03:54
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Benny D posted:Not sure why I felt so strongly the need to point this out, but Stringer was the one constantly reminding people to shut and/or lock the door. I think he did this at least once in like every other episode. I'm not sure if it was intended to present paranoia on his part or what but to this day it makes me giggle a little every time he does it. At one point there was a YouTube montage of every time he says it. It may have seemed paranoid, but to be fair, there was a wired-up stripper informant out there trying to listen in, so he was exactly as careful as he needed to be. And in the end, all the cops needed to hear him say to bust him was "not on the phone," on the phone. Which I suppose is basically the phone equivalent of "shut the door."
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May 29, 2013 14:00
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You guys are all clearly overlooking Michael K Williams' breakout role.
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May 30, 2013 03:17
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Protocol 5 posted:It seemed to me that Hamsterdam was presenting simple decriminalization of drugs as an empty solution. It might be marginally better than the quixotic and brutal War on Drugs, but it doesn't actually deal with any of the related problems. Hamsterdam is quite literally out of sight, out of mind. That was the Deacon's reason for rebuking Colvin, he created this little microcosm, but did nothing to actually improve the situation of the people involved. For the typical heroin addict, getting arrested is not the biggest risk they are taking. For Colvin, I don't think it was ever even about helping the addicts (or the dealers, or anyone else caught up in the game). He even has a line in the season that goes something like "I wanna save the parts of my district that are still worth saving," he seemed content to round them up into a little ghetto and to leave them to their own devices; as long as they kept away from the clean-living people and didn't draw any attention to themselves, he didn't really concern himself with how they were actually doing. All he wanted to do was clean up the corners, he seemed frustrated when the Deacon forced him to actually look around and think about what the addicts' lives were like. Perhaps that's a commentary on the relationship between law enforcement and community. On a marginally related note, I always get a kick out of the fact that the bleeding heart Deacon is played by an honest-to-goodness former drug lord.
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May 30, 2013 15:04
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Munch had a cameo in the X-files too, didn't he? Even in arrested development, now that I think about it.
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Jun 1, 2013 05:24
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ShaneMacGowansTeeth posted:on a note apropros of nothing, this year is the 25th anniversary of the year Simon embedded himself with the Baltimore Homicide department. And again, I'm re-reading that book again, and it's brilliant. Sample dialogue below: I'll second that, it's a really good book. A must-have for Wire fans, you can really see the influence it had on the show. One of the most stand-out facts from it that sticks in my mind is about how the body acts when people get shot. The book explains that when most people get shot, the only reason they fall backwards is because movies and television have programmed them to believe that that's what they're supposed to do. But in reality, if a bullet was strong enough to force a body back, then by the laws of physics, it would also be strong enough to knock back the person shooting the gun; that doesn't happen, though. So you hear stories of people who get shot without realizing it (either because they didn't see it coming, or because they're too pumped up with adrenaline to notice they've been shot or something like that) and just carry on normally; it's not until blood loss forces you down that your body has no choice but to actually fall. I don't know why I remember that part, and it never comes up in The Wire, so I don't know why I mentioned it, but the point is that the book is really good and you should read it. It's not super-long, and it's so engrossing that it's sort of over before you know it.
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Jun 13, 2013 03:28
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Quandary posted:I know this isn't necessary where the rest of the thread is, but I just watched the second to last episode of the first season, and gently caress man. gently caress, why you gotta be like that to Wallace. I started watching season 4 of friday night lights and imagine my surprise to see him all grown up!
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Jun 15, 2013 18:56
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I don't think I could handle being with someone while they're watching it for the first time, starting from the very beginning. I'd probably get frustrated while they climb over the initial "what the hell is going on?" hurdle for the first few episodes and want to be like "DON'T YOU SEE HOW BRILLIANT THIS IS???"
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Jun 15, 2013 19:10
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Mahoning posted:The one bad thing about the Wire is that any (or i should say most) police procedural you watch after you've seen it is about as hokie as an episode of Barney and Friends. Or even any show that tries to touch upon related themes. Like in the season of Friday Night Lights I've just started, Wallace's mom is a drug addict (type cast much???) and he hangs out with the stereotypical "gangsta" crowd, but it all seems so, so, so fake compared to The Wire, I kind of just have to grit my teeth and bear it until the scenes end.
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Jun 15, 2013 20:02
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Minrad posted:Gonna dredge up an old post, sorry. I finished The Wire just a few days ago and I've been reading through this thread since yesterday. One thing that kind of bothered me about Season 5 on re-watch that I didn't really notice before was that Gus kind of comes across (to me, anyway) as a deified version of David Simon himself; he's a smart, savvy, above-all-the-bullshit guy with no real obvious flaws, which kind of sticks out in a series where most of the characters are flawed in some way. But now that you mention it that way, I guess he's actually just sort of another cog in the broken machine; he doesn't take pains to shed light on any of the real problems of the city, like you mentioned in your post. He does his job well, but I guess at the end of the day he's just another schmuck (just a likeable one, I suppose).
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Jun 17, 2013 21:08
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The other boss is even worse. Isn't he even named "whiting?" It might as well be "Whiteboss Von Patriarchy"
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Jun 17, 2013 23:37
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I wonder about the Kintel Williamson thing. We just had a discussion yesterday about how in Season 5, the newspaper brushes off the stories about Prop Joe and Omar, because they don't really rate on their radar, but to us, the viewers, as well as the characters we've been following, those stories are obviously of great importance. I wonder if by the same token, there are equally (esoterically) important stories in the Kintel Williamson case that we just don't get to see because the camera never follows it. I think Daniels even says something like, Stringer's quiet, but Williamson's racking up bodies, and this unit is about the violence; I wonder if by pulling the case off of him there's some other reign of violence that happens off camera.
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Jun 18, 2013 15:44
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There's that, and I also think it's related to Landsman's line which Bort pointed out when Bunk complained about wanting to solve his murder instead of finding Dozerman's gun: "she's dead in a zip code that doesn't matter." Yeah, maybe Williamson isn't as big of a fish as Stringer or other Kingpins, but he's still running a drug crew, he's presumably still killing people and ruining lives and communities, we just don't ever see it; even in our heroes' (figured a certain way) world, there are zip codes that don't matter and evils that get ignored to chase after higher priorities. Or something. Maybe I'm reading too much into it. Ainsley McTree fucked around with this message at 18:16 on Jun 18, 2013 |
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Jun 18, 2013 18:13
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comes along bort posted:Technically all the drug lords are working in zip codes which don't matter. It's more about the fact he's not a high-level player but a glorified corner boy; an easy catch to bump up the stats for Rawls and Burrell. Really he's more of a plot device to get the MCU bitching about not chasing the big prize, and for McNulty to rejoin the unit and push for getting Stringer and Avon. Also he shows up at the New Day Co-Op later on. Well I mean I get that that's how it's presented in the show, I'm just saying that in the same way that some issues are too low-profile to rate on the show's institution's radars (FBI ignoring "ghetto drug poo poo," the Sun ignoring Omar and Prop Joe, the schools ignoring the pragmatic challenges of inner city education, and so on), maybe there are some players who are too low-profile to rate on the show's radar. We never see what Kintel is up to (except in that one New Day co-op scene, which I'll admit I forgot about) because he "doesn't rate" on the narrative, but he's probably out there ruining somebody's day somewhere; McNulty & Co just chose to ignore it because they're focused on something else. In the same way that the ghetto drug poo poo is still tearing Baltimore apart even though the FBI's focused on the bigger fish of terrorism, maybe Williams' small-time drug poo poo is tearing communities apart, even though he's not a high-level player like Stringer or (later) Marlo. He's in a zip code that doesn't matter (I use "zip code" metaphorically here to generally mean "things that people care about"—I get that geographically he's in the same zip codes as the King Pins) to the people that the show's focused on, but the dirt he does is still ruining somebody's day somewhere, he matters to someone. But again, I'm going way, way out into the reeds here—like you say, he's probably really just there as an easy stats-bump for the bosses (though I'll note that that's how the Barksdale case started in Season 1), and since he's just a mid-level dealer he'll just be replaced even if MCU does take him down. I'm probably reading too much into it, it's just fun to do is all
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Jun 18, 2013 21:04
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Jerusalem posted:I've always been interested in Burrell's later complaint of,"If they wanted it to be about the work, I would have made it about the work. If they wanted it to be about the stats, I would have made it about that. But they could never make up their mind which way they wanted it." That all comes out in one of my favorite Burrell scenes, the "they get elected, and they think they know police work" speech he gives Rawls at the end. I thought it was kind of humble of Simon to give such a sympathetic speech to a character that embodied everything he hated about the BPD.
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Jun 20, 2013 00:54
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My main problem with Treme is that it made me feel stupid/uncultured with startling frequency. Like there'd be this parade of characters that would come on and off the show with no introduction, because they're famous musicians/food critics/something else playing themselves and I'm just supposed to recognize them, except I don't, because I'm not really tapped into that part of popular culture. I don't dislike the music exactly, I just...don't care about it very much, which sort of became an obstacle to getting the most out of the show.
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Jun 23, 2013 23:54
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Yeah, I'd start with the corner, just so you can see where Simon was coming from when he made The Wire (also read Homicide if you haven't already).
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Jun 26, 2013 21:20
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I started watching Homicide, and liked it but for whatever reason kind of fell off around season 2. It's definitely a show that suffered from being held back by network regulations though. For example that scandalous scene where a detective calls his captain a "butthead", as baltimore cops are prone to do
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Jun 26, 2013 21:37
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chesh posted:It is the old lady Nick catches looking at him, and I did notice her cleaning her steps in several episodes. That's why I liked the scene where Nick sees her - no one else had even glanced at her for the entire season. I definitely remember her in the ending montage too, but I never noticed the "For sale" sign until now. Whoa.
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Jun 28, 2013 21:59
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I think part of it is that Stringer was the one who got away in Season 1. He got his big victory with Barksdale and everybody else, but he had to leave Stringer on the street, and he couldn't abide that.
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Jul 1, 2013 17:51
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pokeyman posted:I think you're right about the orders part. Slim Charles was a very loyal soldier. If Avon ordered him to make sure Butchie felt the pain, I don't see him saying no. I dunno, he has that line in season 5, where Omar's holding him up at gunpoint in the hallway, asking if he had anything to do with Butchie getting tortured (or maybe it was Joe getting killed, I forget), and he says "if I knew who did it, I'd tell you, I'd help you even." It seems like there are lines that he won't cross. That's not to say he's a Good Guy by any means--he does murder people because drug lords pay him to. Just, you know, with a code I guess
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Jul 3, 2013 01:11
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I think a big part of it is that Cutty did all time in prison for keeping his mouth shut, Avon might feel like he owes him a little something. If he wants out of the game, then it's the least he could do; it'd be pretty cold to kill Cutty after he did that for him (and it's not like anyone who stands tall after all that time in prison is gonna turn around be a rat the moment he gets out; if he was gonna do that, he would've done it to get out early).
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Jul 3, 2013 03:49
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One thing that The Wire has done that's ruined other television for me, is its use of no music other than ambient music that would naturally belong in the scene (with the exception of the occasional montage, and that weird out of place slow-motion walking scene in season one). I hate when I'm watching a show now, and a little music starts to swell, telling me "hey you, an emotional moment is coming, get ready for it, also here's some advice on how to feel about it." I wish more shows would ditch music like that, it makes a really noticeable difference. I'm sure The Wire isn't the first show to do it, but whatever it's the example that stands out to me.
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Jul 12, 2013 00:18
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 21:34 |
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I always thought it was confusing the way they phrased "Prez shot another cop" in that episode. The first time I heard it I thought "he's shot other cops?" and it still throws me a little every time I hear it again.
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Jul 16, 2013 14:12
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