David Bianculli on Christopher Guest (above in Waiting for Guffman), who is the co-creator of the new HBO comedy series Family Tree:

Christopher Guest, of course, has made a career — quite an impressive one — out of marching to his own comedy drummer. As an actor, his standout bizarro roles include the evil six-fingered count in The Princess Bride, the clueless heavy-metal musician Nigel in This is Spinal Tap and a series of memorable characters in a brief but inspired stint on Saturday Night Live. As a writer and director, he amassed a batch of giddily original comedy films — movies with tightly scripted outlines but lots of room for improvisation. If you’ve seen one, you may have seen them all, because they’re habit-forming and they’re that good: A Mighty Wind. Waiting for Guffman. Best in Show. For Your Consideration.

Laura Linney tells Dave Davies about filming sex scenes in the HBO series John Adams, in which she played Abigail Adams (opposite Paul Giamatti as the 2nd president):

What makes historical drama accessible are those moments of, ‘Well, what do you do? What would anybody do? And then that connects you very quickly. You know, what do you do with the wig? And what happens when people who really love each other have been separated? You know, you go to bed. You do. That’s what people who are passionate do. When they’ve been longing for each other and missing each other and the relief of being in each others’ presence, you — you know — jump in the sack. So those sort of things that were truthful to us, that we were then able to work into the story.”

For good measure, here’s our interview with Paul Giamatti. (Thanks for the reminder, Alex Steed.)

image via zap2it

Sebastian Junger tells Terry Gross about the day the late photographer Tim Hetherington started taking pictures of sleeping soldiers while the two were filming Restrepo:

It was a very hot day, boring day. We hadn’t been in a fire fight for at least a week, perhaps more, and the guys were just zoned out. … [S]oldiers kind of sleep as much as they can. One of them said to me, “You know, if you sleep half the time it’s only a six-month deployment,” and so they were sleeping in the middle of the day, sprawled on the ground in their little bunks … and the flies were buzzing around and Tim was scuttling around photographing them. I was like, “Tim, man, what are you doing?” For me it was the ultimate situation where nothing’s going on journalistically and you can just space out and he said, “Don’t you get it? All the photos you see of soldiers, they’re all geared up and they’ve got their weapons and they’re all tough-looking, but when they’re asleep they look like what they really are which are little boys.” And they did: they all looked like they’re about 10-years-old, so vulnerable, you know. And no nation wants to think that their soldiers are vulnerable, but of course they are and Tim saw that.

Nevalla, Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, Afghanistan, 2008. © Tim Hetherington via the International Center for Photography

Sebastian Junger on the trauma of losing his friend and collaborator, Tim Hetherington:

Within an hour I decided not to cover combat again. I didn’t want to risk traumatizing everyone I loved by getting killed myself. I mean, you go to war, you think you’re gambling with your own life and then I realized that what you’re really doing  is gambling with everyone else’s lives, everyone who cares about you. You’re dead. You don’t matter. It’s over. It’s everyone else who has to deal with it. I hadn’t really gotten that either and, when Tim died, I did and I also just ran headlong into the central tragedy of war which is that good people get killed and I sort of didn’t want anything to do with it anymore.

Image of Tim Hetherington in Afghanistan courtesy of Norget

Simple Math:

My brother has his sword, King Robert has his warhammer and I have my mind…and a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone if it is to keep its edge. That’s why I read so much Jon Snow.” - Tyrion, HBO’s Game of Thrones

The lovely Dorothy Ferebee is our Station Services Coordinator as well as our resident Game of Thrones fan. The books and the show. Intimately familiar with both and loving the new season, she says the quote above embodies her favorite character, Tyrion, played by Peter Dinklage, and has been enjoying the new season a great deal. Referring to Tyrion, she says, “He’s vertically challenged and he has to fight all the time because he’s a dwarf. Where they all use swords he uses his mind.”

If you’re curious about what Game of Thrones creator David Benioff was up to before Game of Thrones, here’s an interview with him from 2003.

Image of Peter Dinklage courtesy of HBO

David Bianculli on David Mamet’s new HBO film Phil Spector:

This Phil Spector telemovie, essentially, is a two-person play — an awkward dance between Linda and her eccentric client, as he reveals his shifting psychological states by jamming his mental gears between charming remarks, challenging questions and emotional rants. Pacino is an actor set at hurricane force here, and Mirren matches him by countering his fury with her calm. Mamet’s dialogue, as expected, is crisp and thought-provoking, and these two acting pros make the most of it.

Image of Helen Mirren as Linda Kenney Baden and Al Pacino as Phil Spector courtesy of HBO

From the HBO press release about the new David Mamet-written-and-directed film Phil Spector:

In the hands of celebrated playwright, screenwriter, author, director and producer David Mamet, Phil Spector is a mythological story, and he approaches it as such, rather than as a news story. Mamet begins his film with the card, “This is a work of fiction. It’s not‘ based on a true story.’ It is a drama inspired by actual persons in a trial, but it is neither an attempt to depict the actual persons, nor to comment upon the trial or its outcome.”

David Bianculli is reviewing the film on the show today. In the meantime, here’s an interview with David Mamet (as well as the actor Shawn Ryan) from 2006 about Mamet’s CBS series The Unit.

It’s like, ‘How do I create the things I want to see and how can you make something that is compassionate and potentially can be healing to someone?’ Or, you know, they talk about in Buddhism, there’s Tonglen practice, which is someone breathing in the suffering of either yourself or others and breathing out a kind of hopefulness. And you can see art or fiction or whatever being a version of that, where you try to create something that’s hopeful, that also recognizes pain and doesn’t run from the pain: It actually acknowledges it, because I feel like so much of entertainment right now is about distraction and a bombarding of … light and noise. … And whether I’ve succeeded in that or not, I feel like there is an impulse there. … Even if Enlightened fails, I don’t want to walk away from what I’m trying to achieve which is try to make something that is a little bit more contemplative or a little slowed down or a little bit more about how do we live as opposed to something that’s about distracting you from those questions.

— Mike White tells Terry Gross about his intentions when writing the scripts for Enlightened.

Some reasons why I will be binging on Enlightened this weekend:

1) I have watched all the available episodes of Parenthood

2) This discussion of the show on The Awl:

Why the show works so often for me and punches me in the gut is that it engages in a high-wire act—here is a person who could very easily be a punching bag, or the butt of a lot of jokes, and even though if you met her in person she would very likely be annoying and she is downright inconsiderate to people a lot of the time, I feel a genuine sympathy for her, and that comes from how utterly human she is.

3) This review of the show on The AV Club:

What’s amazing about Enlightened is that it extends that emotional acuity to everybody in its ensemble, no matter how small the part. 

4) This interview with Enlightened’s creator, Mike White, on Vulture.

5) This interview on Buzzfeed in which he gives a shout out to Terry, which brings me to ….

5) Mike White is on the show on Monday.

Guess I better get started. iTunes Store, here I come.

-Nell

Still from Enlightened courtesy of Lacey Terrell/HBO

The HBO show Girls gets all dressed up in its Box Set Season 1 duds today. Included as an extra is the Fresh Air interview with Lena Dunham. We’re tickled!

We’re planning to rebroadcast the interview on Friday, but that is, of course, subject to change as plans often are. If you feel like listening now though, here ya go.

I don’t generally get to play the stronger characters…I get very lovely parts, but they’re quite quiet and thoughtful and watchful — and that’s all well and good, but I’ve been enjoying getting my teeth into something else.

- Kelly Macdonald on her role as Margaret Thompson, the innocent young Irish widow who becomes the capable, self-possessed wife of a corrupt politician in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire

I remember working with Avedon and you get photographers that really don’t get your beauty, because I guess they’re really not used to looking at a woman of color and thinking of her as beautiful…it was a very interesting journey and I worked very hard to establish myself as one of the premiere models so that I could have a voice, so that I could speak about the inequalities in the business.

—  Supermodel Beverly Johnson on working in the modeling industry in the 1970s

The numbers are staggering: One-third of Americans are obese; another third are overweight. Some 26 million Americans have Type 2 diabetes. An additional 79 million more are pre-diabetic. Thanks to these figures, the children of today have a good chance of becoming the first generation of Americans to die at younger ages than their parents.

There is something vulnerable about showing your tattoos to people, even while it gives you a feeling that you are wearing a sleeve when you are naked.

— Lena Dunham on tattoos.