Rich Heldenfels, Pop Culture Wanderer

One of the oddities in the new season of Brockmire  is that, in the 2030s, Jim Brockmire's pornographic fantasy includes Ann-Margret. Brockmire seems too young to have connected with the singer-actress who is a major element of '60s iconography in the Mad Men  Season 3 episode "Love Among the Ruins." Her performance in Bye Bye Birdie  (some of which is above) was so ... invigorating that even the closeted-gay Sal recalls seeing a Broadway actress in the role who, when compared to Ann-Margret, "didn't have that. "* And Ann-Margret did have that: a sexiness that was not coy and coquettish; she was unabashed, hungry, eager -- and knowing. One of the flaws in her casting in Bye Bye Birdie is that she seems too smart for some of the fan-girl excesses in the part. Consider her instead in Viva Las Vegas, nominally a cornball Elvis Presley movie but one where attention diverts to Ann-Margret whenever she is onscreen, no matter how badly a sequence itself has...

I still cruise the television offerings, though sometimes not for long. "Blood and Treasure," the CBS summer series, wasn't even worth finishing the first episode, a clumsily forced attempt at clever action. I managed to make it through one episode of Spectrum's "L.A.'s Finest," a gender-reversed visit to the "Bad Boys" formula, but one was enough; again, everything seemed to have been borrowed elsewhere, and not very well. I've seen a little more of the new Netflix-backed season of "Designated Survivor" ; it seems to be trying to be less of a thriller and more of a political tale (including via real-people documentary footage) but it's not very good at it -- at times a blatant reworking of things "The West Wing" did better. And I can say that from current memory, since I've been binge-watching "West Wing," with six seasons done and the seventh to go. The original flaws are still there -- the unk...

Spoilers included. At dinner with friends recently, the conversation turned to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and the ending of the second season. I thought the season as a whole was powerful in the way it repeatedly emphasized the ruthlessness of the powerful – that the men in charge of Gilead were going to maintain control no matter how brutal they felt they had to be. And that control was not over some women, but all women, as we saw in the execution of a misguided teen (who had been betrayed by her own, control-minded father) and the repeated punishment of Serena. As one of our friends said, Serena thought privilege gave her a pass on society’s worst treatment of women – only she learned otherwise, and finally saw that her “daughter” would be denied even those few things Serena had carried over from the pre-repression years. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the portrayal of women, men and power – not only because of what we see from the men ruling the country (and their, w...