Matthew Weiner, the creator of the series Mad Men, is probably more politically liberal than conservative, and yet a final-season episode of his show acknowledges that Nixon, in 1969, was trying to end the Vietnam War, something leftists all over the country strongly doubted.  It is the Republican politician Henry Francis (Christopher Stanley), not Nixon, who receives a jab for mendaciously saying he supports the President’s objective instead of the war effort, but such dishonesty emanates from pols on both the Right and the Left.  And it emanates from the basically liberal but oversensitive and scurvy Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser), involved with a new girlfriend in the final season after his nice wife spurned him for his adultery.

The Mad Ave master, Don Draper (Jon Hamm), makes no political pronouncements but merely adheres to his religion of Coming Out On Top.  What he quietly realizes, however, is that without family he is too often on the bottom.  His physical separation from wife Megan (Jessica Pare), whom he can love (but does he?), parallels his separation from his children and, to be sure, his first wife.  Don cannot afford to let HIS religion trump family love, and an episode persuading us to believe this ends with daughter Sally (Kiernan Shipka) flatly but sincerely telling Don, “Happy Valentine’s Day.  I love you.”  It is one of the many scenes that demonstrate how much Mad Men concentrates on the human heart.

Mad Men (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I wish the creators of Jane the Virgin hadn’t made Luisa a lesbian because, as far as I’m concerned, Yara Martinez, who plays her, is too lovely to be one.  (Lipstick lesbians are too lovely to be lesbians.)  But, well, make her one they did; and so what we have is some curious comic action involving a lively beauty who’s uninterested in men.  What a drag.  At any rate, the comic action is there:  While Jane fusses with the baby, poor Luisa gets kidnapped by men who handle her with kid gloves until they unfeelingly whack her in the leg.  (What’s up with that?)  Luisa is a SOMEWHAT engaging character—she’d be more engaging in the arms of a man—and Martinez portrays her skillfully.  I fear the actress might be boring in serious moments, but in comic ones she can do funny desperation.  Counts for a lot.

Rambling Rose (1991), starring Laura Dern, pretends to be consequential but isn’t.  It’s as trivial as that 1984 flick with Sally Field, Places in the Heart, which at least features a nice slice of Christianity.  Rose has no real interest at all in Christianity and no good reason to exist.  If its nonexistence were a fact, we would be spared Elmer Bernstein‘s saccharine music and a slight adolescent vulgarity.

Cover of Rambling Rose

The new movie, Sicario (2015), is about the labor of U.S. operatives in trying to wreck a horrifying Mexican drug cartel.  I don’t entirely believe the film any more than I entirely disbelieve it:  for example, is it not true that Kate Macer (Emily Blunt), an FBI agent, is a little slow in catching on to certain things the more mysterious federal operatives are doing?

The film propounds the idea that the only way the U.S. government can bring down those intractable drug lords is to use a vengeful Mexican sicario (hit man) who has personal reasons for killing Mr. Big.  Nothing very sophisticated about this, yet I cannot deny that Sicario offers a certain sophisticated naturalism.  It’s powerful.  One wishes it were better, but it is not the “dismal thriller” I called Denis Villeneuve’s previous movie, Prisoners.  

English: The Merida Initiative, a U.S. Counter-Narcotics Assistance to Mexico. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)