The Hero stars Sam Elliott as the aging Western actor Lee Hayden. Sam Elliott is one of the few actors I consider sexy. If you’ve read anything on this blog before, you know that I seldom comment on how sexy some man or other is. But I do with Sam Elliott. Sam Elliott is one of the few actors who could make me watch a movie with a male lead character. Spoilers ahead. Continue reading “Review: The Hero”
Tag: Laura Prepon
Orange is the New Black Season 5: Thumbs Up vs. Thumbs Down
Orange is the New Black season 5 was both an emotional thrill ride and a disappointment. I want to discuss my likes and dislikes about the latest season. This is not a detailed review. There might be a few spoilers along the way. Continue reading “Orange is the New Black Season 5: Thumbs Up vs. Thumbs Down”
Watch This: Trailer for The Hero
Sam Elliott stars as an aging actor diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in The Hero. He tries to reconcile with his estranged daughter (Krysten Ritter) while striking up a new relationship with a young woman (Laura Prepon). Continue reading “Watch This: Trailer for The Hero”
Orange is the New Black: Finding a Balm for Your Pain
Orange is the New Black season 4 puts viewers through the wringer. Abuse, murder, death, mental illness, surviving rape, corporate greed. It’s dark and horrifying. There are moments of hope, of light. There are ways of dealing. I thought it would good to end my series of posts on the latest season of Orange is the New Black with something brighter. There are spoilers ahead. Continue reading “Orange is the New Black: Finding a Balm for Your Pain”
Orange is the New Black: The Mentally Ill
For the first 3 seasons of Orange is the New Black, two of our favorite characters are obviously mentally ill. At the end of season 3, two more mentally ill inmates join the cast. None of these women belong in a prison. The alternative provided, called simply Psych on OITNB, is apparently worse than the prison. Spoilers ahead, beware. Continue reading “Orange is the New Black: The Mentally Ill”
Orange is the New Black: Musings and Observations
Season 4 of Orange is the New Black is on everyone’s mind now. I’ve barely had time to watch it all. This post collects some random observations and stray musings on season 4. It is not meant to be a review of the season, but there are some spoilers. Continue reading “Orange is the New Black: Musings and Observations”
Watch This: Trailer for The Girl on the Train
The Girl on the Train stars Emily Blunt in a tale based on Paula Hawkins’ bestselling novel by the same name. I fell in love with Emily Blunt way back in Sunshine Cleaning in that exact moment when she climbed up a wobbly wooden train trestle as a train thundered overhead. I haven’t found any reason to lessen my admiration for her acting since then, and here she mucking about with a train again. It’s a beautiful thing, I tell you. Continue reading “Watch This: Trailer for The Girl on the Train”
3 Themes in Season 3 of Orange is the New Black
Season 3 of Orange is the New Black returns again and again to several themes. My big 3 are the difficulties of maintaining a family while in prison, the need for some sort of spiritual hope, and the need for love.
If you haven’t watched all of season 3 yet, there are spoilers ahead.
Parents in Prison
Pregnant prisoner Dayanara Diaz (Dascha Polanco) struggled for most of the season with what to do with her baby. Her mother Aleida (Elizabeth Rodriguez) is in prison, too. Aleida is a terrible parent – the worst! – but she tries to guide Daya to a good decision.
Daya hopes the baby’s father, Correctional Officer John Bennett (Matt McGorry), will step up and take the baby, but Bennett isn’t up to the challenge.
Daya reported another Correctional Officer, the horrible “Pornstache” (Pablo Schreiber) as the rapist who got her pregnant. Now she’s living with the lie.
Pornstache’s mother Delia (Mary Steenburgen) wants to adopt the child. Alida loves this idea because it means money. Even after Daya tells Delia the truth about whose baby it is, Delia wants it. Daya wobbles back and forth between wanting to give her baby to Delia and wanting to keep it in the family. The decision she finally makes feels right, but ends in disaster.
In other story lines about families, the character Maria (Jessica Pimentel) is dealt a painful parenting blow from her little girl’s father. Gloria (Selenis Leyva) struggles to keep her teen on the straight and narrow. Sophia (Laverne Cox) has some especially hard parenting problems.
The fact is, most women in prison have children, over half of them under the age of 18. Because of changes in sentencing laws during the war on drugs, the number of parents of minor children in prison increased by 79% between 1991 and 2007. Orange is the New Black can’t take us through story lines about the long term effects of so many mothers being locked away, so many broken families, but the series does its best to bring the problem to the front.
Think about Big Boo’s (Lea DeLaria) comments on the book Freakonomics about the number of unwanted children being reduced by Roe vs. Wade resulting in fewer neglected and abused children turning to crime 20 years later. Flip that on its head and ask yourself what the result of harsh drug sentencing laws that sent thousands of mothers to prison for minor drug crimes will be in 20 years.
Faith & Religion
Norma (Annie Golden) is at the center of one of the crazy rumor-driven stories in the prison. Some of the prisoners decide she is holy. Since she doesn’t speak, she simply smiles and pats them on the shoulder when they suggest this. They think she’s blessing them, and eventually she starts enjoying the attention and begins to act like the guru she followed as a younger woman. Everyone wants something to hang on to, some spiritual hope, and Norma is it for the moment.
A second plot line around religion involves the discovery that if you ask for a kosher meal, you get better food. Many of the inmates start asking for kosher food. Black Cindy (Adrienne C. Moore) wants to learn enough about being Jewish to pass the test when they ask her why she should be eating kosher.
Cindy starts off on her Jewish experience watching Woody Allen movies but soon turns to an actual study of the faith. By the last episode, she has been accepted as Jewish by other Jews and even experiences a mikveh, or total immersion in water, as a symbol of her new identity as a Jew.
The Need for Love
Was it love that made Piper (Taylor Schilling) rat on Alex (Laura Prepon) in season 2, so she would be back in Litchfield Prison in season 3? Whatever the case, they reunite with hate-sex that involves lots of slapping, shoving and biting. Piper eventually asks Alex to be her official girlfriend. Alex says yes. Then the new inmate Stella (Ruby Rose) catches Piper’s eye and official girlfriends don’t seem so important.
They had to burn all the books because of bedbugs. Suzanne (Uzo Aduba) fills the gap in reading material when she writes crazy sci-fi porn and passes it around the prison. She gets fans! She has readers! Prisoners are desperate for any kind of love and/or romance they can find, and Suzanne provides them with a semblance of a love story. One fan in particular, Maureen (Emily Althaus), really wants to connect with her idol Crazy Eyes. Suzanne doesn’t know how to act around the idea of having a real girlfriend, not a dandelion. In the last episode, Suzanne and Maureen make tentative but thrilling contact.
Poussey (Samira Wiley) is so lonely and love-starved that she stays drunk on her homebrew most of season 3. Soso (Kimiko Glenn) is lonely, rejected, friendless, and depressed most of season 3. Something happens that brings these two closer and may be the much needed relationship they both lack.
The loyalties, the friendships, the “families” that form inside prison help people retain their sanity. Maria points out in the first episode, “Mother’s Day,” once people get released, they forget their prison friends. Yet, while inside, the need to feel connected, to be seen and understood by at least one other human being, does not go away. Crazy Eyes even says it out loud, “People need love.”
In addition to this big 3 list, season 3 of Orange is the New Black also deals with the idea of for-profit prisons and the lack of mental health care for inmates. It does all this while still managing to be funny, character driven drama of the highest order. It’s changing American culture, one story at a time.
Note: This post was syndicated at BlogHer.com.
Orange is the New Black Season 3
I just finished all the episodes of season 3 of Orange is the New Black. I’ll be writing about it in more depth, but I wanted to share some quick thoughts.
Themes
Season 3 could be subtitled “I need to be loved.” The sentiment was a theme in many of the episodes and back stories that played out this season. In one episode, Suzanne “Crazy Eyes” (Uzo Aduba) even says those exact words. Loneliness and a need for connection drove so many story lines.
Another theme of season 3 was parenting. Daya (Dascha Polanco) had her baby in season 3, of course, but so many episodes dealt with the difficulties of parenting while incarcerated. Over half of the women in prison have children under the age of 18. The emphasis on how parents and children are torn apart when mothers are in prison gave a very sad feeling to season 3.
The prison is bought by a for-profit corporation in season 3. The private ownership of prisons as sources of profit is an obscene practice and a great shame in the American “justice” system.
Mental health care – or more correctly the lack of mental health care – in the prison system is another theme this season.
Finally, there’s a thread about faith, spirituality and religion running through season 3. Santaria, anyone? Mazel tov!
Characters
Laura Prepon was back as Alex, while other favorites disappeared into SHU or plain disappeared. I missed those people.
There were interesting guest stars. Mary Steenbergen was in several episodes as the mother of Pornstache. Blair Brown was in a few episodes as a celebrity in trouble who surrenders herself to Litchfield in the last episode.
New prisoners included Ruby Rose, Lori Petty and Emily Althaus. All of them had a effect on the prison and the inmates in fascinating ways. Speaking of fascinating, some of the new back stories this season were surprising.
Okay. More later about all these topics. If you have overall comments about season 3, please share.
Orange is the New Black Rewatch Binge
June 12 and the release of season 3 of Orange is the New Black is just far enough away to let me rewatch the first two seasons in a cozy binge.
This is what fascinates me: the series starts out with the main story being about Piper, the privileged white woman who ends up in prison. The regular cast members listed are Taylor Schilling, Michael Harney, Kate Mulgrew, Laura Prepon, Michelle Hurst and Jason Biggs. By the second & third episode some of the actors like Danielle Brooks, Uzo Aduba, Natasha Lyonne, and Laverne Cox begin to show up as guest stars.
Actors we’ve grown to love from the show such as Dascha Polanco, Selenis Levya and Samira Wiley were listed in the ending credits. They didn’t even show up as guest stars early in the series.
I’m struck by how much of the story of what’s happening in Litchfield Prison has moved away from the white characters and how the minor actors in the beginning like Samira Wiley have moved up to become regulars.
As viewers, we have become attached to characters that we might never have had a chance to like and respond to anywhere else but in Orange is the New Black. It’s brilliant how Jinji Kohan and the other writers let Crazy Eyes and Big Boo and Gloria and Nicky and Morello sneak their way into our hearts by bringing each to the front slowly. Not to mention Sister Ingalls (Beth Fowler) and Maritza (Diane Guerrero), Watson (Vicky Jeudy) and many others.
After two years, the most popular characters on OITNB are played by Samira Wiley, Danielle Brooks, Lea DeLaria and Laverne Cox. We no longer have to be lead into Litchfield stories by holding hands with someone white. Because of great writing, great acting talent, great personal presence, the most “other” members of the cast have become the default stars on Orange is the New Black. The story and the characters took off like a runaway train with a momentum that has carried us far from the original story in the book by Piper Kerman on which the series was based.
There are still white people in the story. Piper and Alex are still there, Red is still around, Nicky and Morello are still there, all the correctional officers and prison bosses are still there. But Piper is no longer the chief focus. In season 2, when Vee (Lorraine Toussaint) was around, much of the focus was on her and her effect on everyone at Litchfield. We’ll see where things go in season 3, but I’m 100% behind the diversity. I’d love to see one of the Hispanic characters become more known and important.
We’ve accepted the rainbow of characters who inhabit the prison, we care about them all. It’s a act of writing and planning by Jinji Kohan that I admire and respect. Diversity on our TV screens has an effect on the culture. I can’t wait to see how OITNB brings more of it in season 3.
What I’m waiting to see is the day when a black woman or a Hispanic woman or an Asian woman can be the lead character to lead us into a drama like this one.