Omar’s lover Renaldo to be in two summer blockbusters

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 and Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen? Damn. And his Wire role wasn’t even all that meaty. In the figurative sense.

You could always watch The Wire *again*

That’s what Alan Sepinwall is doing on his blog, “What’s Alan Watching?” The NJ Star-Ledger TV critic has some of the finer—and thorough—episode recaps, especially on “The Wire.” Not only are the posts high-caliber, but the comments section are potent with thoughtful discussion.

Last year, he announced he would start anew with retrospective recaps, one episode a week, starting with Season 1, with both “veteran” and “newbie” posts.

And, this summer, comes the Season 2 recaps.

The Road trailer, with Omar

It’s about time we’ve seen something come out of the highly-anticipated Cormac McCarthy adaptation. A trailer’s been released, and you can get a shot of Michael K. Williams (Omar) wielding a knife near the end.

The trailer’s a little too “Hollywood, Balls Out!” for me, but reports from early screenings say that it follows the novel really closely. Esquire was there when Harvey Weinstein was picking out the trailers and even said they were completely misleading.

David Simon on “Real Time with Bill Maher”

Sharing a panel with National Review journalist Richard Brookhiser, commentator Amy Holmes, and columnist Dan Savage.

Part 1:

Simon shows up around Part 5 or you can cut to an excerpt here:

And the Overtime segment:

Ze War on Drugz

One of David Simon’s stated Season 1 themes was showing America’s failure on “The War on Drugs.” And one of Simon’s common interview rants for the other America is “what drugs have not destroyed, the war on them has.“

There’s an interesting parallel quote from Gil Kerlikowske, Obama’s Drug Czar, in today’s Wall Street Journal: “Regardless of how you try to explain to people it’s a ‘war on drugs’ or a ‘war on a product,’ people see a war as a war on them,” he said. “We’re not at war with people in this country.”

Most of us know that President Obama said The Wire was his favorite show in the primaries—a declaration more politically ballsy than one would expect from a trivial question, so it’s fun to see where the thought coincides.

After Season 5 stopped airing, writers Simon, Ed Burns, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, and Richard Price co-wrote a piece for Time magazine called “The Wire’s War on the Drug War,” asking Americans selected for jury duty on a nonviolent drug case to vote for jury nullification.

Tremé!

This one’s a double banger, told through a personal anecdote!

Like many of you, I watched in awe as Hurricane Katrina ripped through New Orleans, and in frustrated ire during its aftermath. The media’s light illuminated a broken America, with its emergency infrastructure hindered by bureaucratic failure, and accountability became a game of Hot Potato. Sound familiar? Eventually, the media cycle wore out, and the general public moved on—but NOLA didn’t really recover.

While visiting my folks, we spent quality family time watching Spike Lee’s HBO documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. Whereas Lee’s trademark anger usually shocks and ignites, Levees is a sobering meditation of trauma followed by a quick succession of despair, disappointment, and then hopelessness.

Documentary’s first few minutes:

“Refugees”:

Terence Blanchard playing his trumpet through the storm-ravaged streets of his hometown:

New Orleans native Wendell Pierce (Bunk Moreland) is one of the talking heads, and his story of sleazy insurance loopholes just rips. To those unfamiliar with The Wire, watching the actor break down into tears is certainly sad, but this is motherfucking BUNK. No cigar, no grumbling, no callous black humor—just a man beaten down by corporate sidestepping.

A month later, an opportunity came up to go down to NOLA and work with the St. Bernard Project. I went a few days early to visit an old friend, who skipped the standard French Quarter hoohah to tour other parts of town. And what neglect there was. The majority of houses were left abandoned and uninhabitable, street signs were replaced with makeshift scrawl, and spray painted X’s marked loss like headstones. The Lower 9th Ward was basically a prairie of overgrown weeds, interrupted by a driveway to nowhere.

President Obama had just won the election, and the city was ebullient. It was a good time to be visiting from Chicago, and everyone I talked to seemed ready for whatever Hope and Change was promised. Suddenly, my own optimism seemed so trivial.

I started work on a house in St. Bernard Parish with a number of volunteers from all over the country. It’s the sort of experience that bonds—from hanging out at Camp Hope (now closing to become what it once was: a school) and eating food cooked by Habitat for Humanity, to watching CNN cover one a housewarming party (one of St. Bernard Project’s founders won the CNN Heroes 2008 top prize), to visiting the Musician’s Village and hanging out with Smokey Johnson in his backyard.

One night, a crew wanted to do the tourist thing and get blitzed. We hopped into cabs and directed them to the French Quarter. Eventually, I started to needle our driver for any leads on the new David Simon project.

“So how far is Treme from the French Quarter?”
“You mean, Tremé? Not far at all. It’s great—a step away from the party atmosphere. Why would you want to go there?”
“I heard they’re making a TV show about it.”
“You mean K-Ville? I think that’s done.”
“No, no, a new one. By the guy who did The Wire.”
“Ah, I haven’t heard anything about it. But K-Ville was a great show.”
“Really? I thought New Orleans folk hated it.”
“I mean, it was cheesy and they got a lot of things wrong, but, you know, we take what we can get. Whatever keeps us in the public conscience is a good thing for us.”

He dropped us off at LaFitte’s Blacksmith Shop Bar (one of the oldest bars in the United States) and told us where not to go.

Tremé plans to be a drama following a tight community of New Orleans residents rebuilding their lives in the months following Katrina.

The aforementioned Wendell Pierce plays trombonist Antoine Batiste. Khandi Alexander (Fran in The Corner and Dr. Alexx Woods in CSI:Miami) plays his estranged wife and the owner of a local bar. Clarke Peters (Lester Freamon) plays a Mardi Gras Indian trying to convince his tribe to come back home. Steve Zahn plays a dancer, DJ, and musician. Kim Dickens (Joanie Stubbs from Deadwood and Matt Saracen’s Mom in Friday Night Lights) plays a chef. Rob Brown is cast as the son of Peters’ character, a New York jazz musician who reluctantly comes home. Melissa Leo (Det. Sgt. Kay Howard on Homicide) plays a civil rights lawyer.

And what’s a David Simon project without some locals? Phyllis Montana LeBlanc was so memorable in Levees, that Spike Lee recommended her for a role as Pierce’s character’s girlfriend.

Kermit Ruffins and Elvis Costello make cameos in the pilot, which began filming in March 2009. Apparently, HBO liked what they saw, as they ordered at least ten more scripts and have moved the project from pilot to series.

The series’ Wikipedia entry is pretty comprehensive and the imdb listing has the cast/crew. Dave Walker at the New Orleans Times-Picayune has been following the news very closely. Can’t wait.

The New Punch Out!! on Nintendo’s Wii

Little Mac is back—with a little help from Isiah Whitlock, Jr. (Clay Davis).

It brings me back to an old Verizon commercial Whitlock was in, “Dad Got Hosed.”

Here’s an amazing Wire-related remix: