Day: April 1, 2015

In a 4.1 Hitfix interview with Mad Men‘s Jon Hamm, Alan Sepinwall asks Hamm to explain why Don Draper has refused to grow even modest-length sideburns despite the fact that by 1969 each and every creative person on the planet earth had begun to let their hair and sideburns grow at least a little bit.

Sepinwall: “Over the years, other [Mad Men] characters’ looks have changed dramatically, [but] Don’s look has remained constant. Has that helped you stay centered in the character, or have you ever wished that you could grow muttonchops or a ‘stache? ”

Hamm: “I think it makes sense. I think Don is invested in staying Don. I think it’s on purpose from a creative standpoint. And I support the choice. That’s how we start the final season, if you look at season 7 as one long season, you see the LA airport, and it’s all bright colors and new things and shiny planes, and new things and hippies and hot women and colors and psychedelics, and through it all moves this gray man that we’ve seen for the last ten years, and he’s exactly the same. And he looks so out of place.”

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Alex Gibney‘s All Or Nothing At All (HBO, 4.5 and 4.6), the two-part, four-hour doc on Frank Sinatra, is quite the loving valentine. It goes easy and then some, but it makes you feel like you’re in Sinatra’s home corner every step of the way, and in this sense it’s unique — there’s never been this much love and understanding shown to Sinatra and his legend from a polished, first-class doc by a world-renowned director. It’s Gibney’s trick, of course, to make you feel that you’re not being egregiously lied to. Which of course the doc is definitely doing by omission. What matters is that Gibney’s accumulation of lies are, at day’s end, artful. Because the doc is filled with bedrock emotional truths and echoes.

This is an intimate saga of an artist with a profound vocal gift, a legendary sense of style, a swaggering ego, an open heart when it came to friends and family, a lust for the ladies, a chip on his shoulder and a street attitude that led to certain feelings of kinship and camaraderie with mob guys. And you can’t beat the first 56 years of Sinatra’s life (’15 to ’71) for sheer emotion, Shakesperean drama, urban pizazz, ups and downs, top-of-the-world success and down-in-the-gutter career blues…a saga of an all-American, knock-around life that spanned most of the 20th Century, and one that became less and less interesting when Sinatra turned smug and gray and more-or-less Republican in the late ’60s until his death on 5.14.98 at age 82.

I was quite moved and charmed by much of it, but this is a family-approved doc that’s basically about re-igniting commercial interest in Sinatra product (CDs, films) by way of celebrating his 100th birthday, which is actually not until 12.12.15. That means it’s really friendly…a doc that is always looking to show love and understanding or at least muted affection…a highly skillful handjob as far as classy, high-end biopics go. No judgment, no impartiality…every well-known or rumored-about negative in Sinatra’s bio is finessed or explained away in some first-hand, no-big-deal fashion by Sinatra himself or by a friend, or otherwise brushed off.

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Are you now or have you ever been a person who doesn’t “get it” and therefore needs to have the shit beaten out of him/her on Twitter? Are you now or have you ever been disturbingly non-progressive, in some way out-of-step or guilty of insufficient understanding of a pressing social issue or agenda? Are you now or have you ever been some kind of closet discriminator? A person whose views are (or once were) politically retrograde, politically insensitive or in any way dismissive of any socially marginalized or discriminated-upon group?

What is the difference between (a) scanning a person’s Twitter feed from two or three or four years ago in search of politically incorrect or insensitive tweets to use against him/her and (b) a HUAC committee in the late 1940s or early ’50s searching through a Hollywood filmmaker’s political associations or statements from the 1930s? Or, for that matter, a Chinese Communist Party official looking to discredit and re-educate a nonloyal person in the midst of the Cultural Revolution of ’66 to the mid ’70s? It’s the same basic impulse — i.e., to identify, shame and punish the miscreant, the outlier, “the other.”

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