2013 Golden Globes, Bill Murray

If you are too busy watching the Australian cycling thing and can't understand what the hell is going on with Twitter (honestly, we don't know who you follow, but no one on our feed actually bothers naming the winners of these things), here are the latest updates for the 2013 Golden Globe Awards.

Best Motion Picture, Drama
WINNER: Argo
Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture, Drama
WINNER: Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln

Best Performance by a Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture, Drama
WINNER: Jessica Chastain, Zero Dark Thirty

Best Motion Picture, Drama
WINNER:

Best Motion Picture, Comedy or Musical
WINNER: Les Mis

Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture- Comedy or Musical
WINNER: Hugh Jackman, Les Mis

Best TV Series, Comedy or Musical
WINNER: GIRLS

Best Director
WINNER: Ben Affleck, Argo

Cecil B. DeMille's Lifetime Achievement Award/Freestyle Portion of Evening
WINNER: Jodie Foster

Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series - Comedy or Musical
WINNER: Lena Dunham, Girls

Best Animated Feature Film
WINNER: Brave

Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series - Drama
WINNER: Claire Danes, Homeland

Best Foreign Film
WINNER: Amour

Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series - Comedy or Musical
WINNER: Don Cheadle, House of Lies

Best Screenplay
WINNER: Quentin Tarantino, Django Unchained

Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture
WINNER: Anne Hathaway, Les Miserables

Best Performance by a Supporting Actor in a Mini-Series or a Motion Picture Made for Television
WINNER: Ed Harris, Game Change

Best Performance by an Actor in a Mini-Series or a Motion Picture Made for Television
WINNER: Kevin Costner, Hatfields & McCoys
(RUNNER-UP: Benedict Cumberbatch, Sherlock)

Best Performance by an Actress in a Mini-Series or a Motion Picture Made for Television
WINNER: Julianne Moore - Game Change

Best Television Series - Drama
WINNER: Homeland

Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture
WINNER: Christoph Waltz - Django Unchained

Best Performance by a Supporting Actress in a Mini-Series
WINNER: Maggie Smith - Downton Abbey

Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series - Drama
WINNER: Damien Lewis - Homeland

Best Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television
WINNER: Game Change

Best Original Song
WINNER: "Skyfall," Adele

Best Original Score - Motion Picture
WINNER: Life of Pi

Best Actress in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy
WINNER: Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Lining Playbook (Also, best speech? Y/N?)

Brody finds a payphone! (Showtime)

These questions regard last night’s episode of Showtime’s Homeland. Please answer the prompts with specific examples from SUNDAY’S EPISODE, though supplementary material will be accepted as a secondary source. Please write legibly. No. 2 pencils only. You have an hour to finish this test. See below for questions and sample responses.
1. The only personal item in Quinn's bare-bones apartment is a copy of Great Expectations in which he keeps a picture of his newborn son, John Jr. There is a character named John in Great Expectations: Mr. Wemmick, the man with "a post-office of a mouth" who serves as the go-between for Pip and his lawyer, Jaggers. How may Quinn be comparing himself (John Sr.) to Wemmick here? What other similarities might he see between his current situation and the plot of the Dickens novel?

The most obvious comparison between Quinn and Wemmick, besides the aforementioned "go-between" status, would be that they both go by their last names, as a way of protecting themselves against the world. (That's why his baby's mamma waits for Saul to give John X a last name and isn't forthcoming with one.)

Additionally, Wemmick builds himself a replica of a castle with a moat to live in to protect himself from the outside world; Quinn lives in a secure fortress of solitude and apparently spends more money on security measures devices than decor.

Wemmick's split personality is revealed with his love for his fiancé, which humanizes him in Pip's eyes. The only link Quinn has to the outside world is the mother of his son and his child.

So even while we hate Quinn for trying to kill Brody, we must remember what Pip says of Wemmick, "there were twin Wemmicks and this was the wrong one."

2. The title of the episode, "Two Hats," refers to Quinn's two jobs (analyst/assassin), but several characters conspicuously wear hats over the course of the episode: Nazir, Quinn, Quinn's real boss (F. Murray Abraham!) and, of course, the oft-behatted Saul. We have many expressions involving hats in English beyond the titular one: we do something at the drop of one, talk through one, keep things under one, etc. Which of these or other idiomatic hats are evoked by the characters' various chapeaux?

It struck me watching this episode how the writers have finally found a use for Mike, who now wears "two hats": He is both a source of comfort/security for Jess and the Brodys, and is the apparent go-between for the CIA and the family. (How good is he laying down the law as Dana's new daddy? So good!)
"Keep it under your hat" could be the alternate name for this entire series, while "I'll eat my hat" is usually what I find myself saying in regards to the realism of Homeland. As in: "If it turns out that Carrie is the last person to know that Estes and Quinn have a hit out on Brody, I'll eat my hat." I've eaten several hats this season, BTW.

3. It is clear from Estes comments and Quinn's actions that CIA brass still considers Brody a terrorist and a threat. In light of the two details that Brody apparently chooses to leave out of the retelling of his abduction--Nazir thanking him for saving his life in Beirut, and the two of them praying together--how justified is such a judgment? Has Homeland tipped its hand, or do we still not know where Brody's true allegiances lie?

Ah, nope. We know where Brody's true alliance lies at this point: With Carrie and his family and the good ole' U.S. of A. Of the two things he leaves off his confession, Carrie knows about one of them (that Brody is a secret Muslim), and the second one seems more like one of those lapses that she would forgive him for once Brody becomes "a hero." We don't even know why the CIA would plan on killing Brody once Abu Nazir is dead, or why Brody's life is contingent on Nazir staying alive...a plot device that will inevitably lead Carrie into letting Nazir escape so Brody can live.

4. What is the significance of Nazir's CIA code name "Sandman"? Reference at least two of the following in your answer: "Mr. Sandman" by the Chordettes, "Enter Sandman" by Metallica, "The Sandman" by E.T.A. Hoffmann, the Sandman series by Neil Gaiman, the Spider-Man villain The Sandman.
1. In many of the Spider-Man continuums, William Baker/Flint Marko commits some criminal act in order for his daughter, Suzie, to live a better life, and in doing so sacrifices his life for hers. While Isa ended up dying, it was the impetus for Abu Nazir to wage a more personal war on American soil.

2. The Chordettes sing: "Give him a pair of eyes with a come-hither gleam, Give him a lonely heart like Pagliacci":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CX45pYvxDiA
In the Italian opera Pagliacci, the titular character is the iconic "sad clown" who sings to his audience that actors have feelings too. When his wife Nedda is unfaithful to him, he kills her. One could say that "Mr. Sandman" (in this case Nazir) created a "dream" for Carrie much in the style of the song; he has an unfaithful wife, and is constantly trying to convince Carrie and the CIA that he, too, is a human being. ("Do you believe me?" Brody asks Carrie. "Because that's the only thing I care about.") Although, unfortunately, Damien Lewis does not have "wavy hair like Liberace."

5. These days Carrie seems to be holding it together slightly better with each passing episode. On a scale from one to electroconvulsive therapy, how far off the deep end will she fall if the CIA succeeds in killing Brody off?

It depends on how you define "crazy." We saw what would happen if Carrie believes Brody is dead in the beginning of this episode ... she handles it with remarkable professionalism. However, if she knew Estes and Quinn were behind it, it wouldn't take much for her to go all vigilante on the CIA and start taking them out, one by one. Is that crazy? Maybe, but if Brody was gone, I doubt I'd watch the show either, which could effectively lead to them canceling the series and "killing" all the characters.

Besties! (Showtime)

These questions regard the second season premiere of Showtime’s Homeland. Please answer the prompts with specific examples from SUNDAY’S EPISODE, though supplementary material will be accepted as a secondary source. Please write legibly. No. 2 pencils only. You have an hour to finish this test. See below for questions and sample responses.

1.  Trace the arc of Brody's demeanor throughout this episode—pleading soon-to-be-ex-husband, shady government official, seductive spy, snarling villain. Describe each "phase" with a character equivalent from the popular TV show Doctor Who.

Instead of an arc, let's call it a tour de force. Lewis is always amazing, but man. Drama classes should be made to repeatedly watch a clip of the flicker that comes across his face after Carrie calls him out. Right after that, he says "Turns out I'm really good at this," and half the audience screamed out "Yes you are, Damien" (while the other half grunted "Not as good as you think, Brody").

The fact is, this isn't a character arc as much as a day in the life of Nicholas Brody. He embodies this range of different personas over the course of what must be less than 24 hours (yet another way in which Homeland is a less-gimmicky version of 24), and so we have to wonder: who is really the crazy one in that hotel room? How thoroughly Nazir did a number on his mind is, I think, still becoming clear.

The obvious analogy is to the Doctor Who villain The Master, who chews the scenery and kills millions of people, and then turns out to have been driven deliberately crazy by his people, who made him look into the nothingness of spacetime. Oh, and they implanted a martial drumbeat into his head that only he can hear that induces him to try to rule the world and kill everyone. Also he's unspeakably horrible to his wife, and she's the one who ends up killing him. On that note, it almost embarrasses me, how excited I am to see what happens when Jessica learns the truth. Will her inevitable total meltdown somehow end in her having yet another different amazing hairstyle?

As for the others: alternate-universe Pete Tyler, Margaret Blaine (aka Blon Fel-Fotch Pasameer-Day Slitheen) and, of course, Captain Jack Harkness (who would have managed to find a way to have sex with Carrie even after he realized she knew he was a terrorist).

2. We still have not learned who the mole is, but now we are introduced to another "Sherlock" (yes, I am running with this term): an analyst named Peter Quinn who looks to have his own set of brilliant quirks and immediately gets on Carrie's nerves. Is this an attempt on the part of the writers to:
A) Present a new, healthy love interest for Carrie;
B) Present a new, unhealthy love interest for Carrie as they bond over their obsessive voyeurism;
C) Make an off-message analogy to former New York Supreme Court Justice Peter Quinn.

Quinn called Carrie crazy as soon as he met her, and now he's seen it in action. It seems doubtful love is in the air, or the cards, for these two. As in any case when writers shoehorn a new character uncomfortably into a show, this seems to be a response to a narrative problem—and it is a hardly a romantic one.

We still have most of a season to go, and if Homeland is going to be more from here on out than us watching Brody rot in Gitmo, the best path is to have then try to turn Brody and lead them to Nazir. But there is no way now that they can let Carrie or Saul run him as a double agent. They're way too compromised. Enter: new character with a totally clean narrative slate to fulfill any role the CIA and the writers need him to!

Also, if there really is a mole in the CIA, and its a character whose name we know, we were basically down to one person: Galvez. At least now they've given us two, so it's not 100 percent obvious. (It's totally Galvez.)

3. How is Dana and Finn's ultimately doomed relationship like that of the two lovers in Dvorak's Rusalka OR in Henry James's The Golden Bowl? How are they different? (Bonus question: what kind of secret service lets the VP's kid unlimited access to a closed-off Washington Monument when Hurricane Irene made the obelisk structurally unsound? And what if there had been terrorists at the top?)

Isn't Rusalka just The Little Mermaid with an even unhappier ending? Dana doesn't seem to be giving up anything on par with the sacrifice of the female leads of those stories just to be with the prince (or veep's son). Her big trial here would just be dumping a stoner boyfriend that she is almost as bored with as the audience clearly is.

The key here is that their fathers' politics will ultimately keep them apart, so a closer analogy would be Romeo and Juliet, and we all know how that one turns out. We'll be needing to keep Dana away from sharp objects before the season ends. Meanwhile, as with Shakespeare's play--a tragedy that plays out like a comedy until the very end--we can enjoy the spectacle of young love blooming. In this case, blooming while they stand gazing out of what is basically the head of a giant penis. Way to go for subtlety Finn/writers.

4. There are over 30 types of red herring fallacies. Pick the top five that relate to Saul and Quinn's profiling of the cab driver, Roya Hammad, and the car wash guy. Extra credit if you can guess which one (besides Roya Hammad) will turn out to be an agent for Nazir.

I see through your little trick: the question itself is a red herring. They decide to follow three "brown" people, but none of the three is Hammad. The third was some graduate student who was never referred to before. Why do they decide to follow everyone but Roya? Saul was being honest: he wasn't racial profiling, he was just profiling—picking the people most likely to be terrorists. Roya Hammad is unlikely to be a terrorist, almost as unlikely as Nicholas Brody.

It seems Saul completely overlooks her because he already knows her/knows of her and doesn't think of her as a possible terrorist. The fact that she is a TV journalist reinforces this: being in the public eye, she is the essence of hiding in plain sight. It goes to show that the CIA has not taken Carrie's lessons to heart. They couldn't suspect Brody because it was too obvious, and they will keep missing what is right in front of them, chasing car wash guys and cab drivers who, we know, can't possibly be on Nazir's payroll.

In Homeland, the CIA is the essence of doing things in roundabout ways; Carrie will never be right for the CIA because she is straightforward. It seems shocking when she goes and tells Brody exactly what he is—and how she feels about that—until you realize that she has been doing the same thing over and over this whole time.

Carrie, in other words, is the cure to all red herrings.

5. Back to Peter Quinn: The actor playing him, Rupert Friend, is best known for his role in Pride and Prejudice as Mr. Wickham, the seemingly "good catch" (as opposed to Darcy) for Elizabeth Bennett. Using Jane Austen's text, explain why Quinn will probably be exposed as the mole by the end of the season.

Ok, so: Wickham seems great and turns out to be evil, just like a mole. I hear you. I still think it's Galvez.

Pride and Prejudice is your classic "marriage plot" novel: we know the protagonists are going to get together in the end, and so all the narrative interest is generated by the things keeping them apart. The "complications" of their relationship are the novel's plot complications; without them, there would be no story. Of course, this means, ironically, that our enjoyment of such a novel is guaranteed not by the happy ending itself, but by the bumps in the road on the way to that ending—and there is no greater bump in the road for Elizabeth and Darcy than George Wickham. (Wickham is such a charming rogue in part because we can't help but like him. Like Darcy's pride, he's a big part of what makes the story interesting.)

But if this episode showed us anything, it is that we have no idea where this show is really going. Marriage-plot-like templates clearly don't work here: in any other show, Carrie and Brody's cat/mouse game would have extended all season. That's how shows like this work, and in that case, speculation like Quinn = mole or Quinn = Carrie love interest would have made much more sense. But that's not what is happening here. Homeland toyed with our expectation for CIA-type shows and then pulled it out from under us. Once your forehead hits the floor that hard, it's hard to see what's up ahead.

Completely normal, happy person Carrie Mathison. (Showtime)

These questions regard the second season premiere  of Showtime's Homeland. Please answer the prompts with specific examples from SUNDAY'S EPISODE, though supplementary material will be accepted as a secondary source. Please write legibly. No. 2 pencils only. You have an hour to finish this test. See below for questions and example responses.

Well, it's still in the opening credits, so I doubt the beleaguered jazz metaphor for Carrie's thoughts--They're free-form! Sometimes brilliant! Most people would rather claw their own ears off than listen to them for an hour! But old Jewish men get it!--is going anywhere soon. Ugh, but seriously. Enough with the jazz. Also, enough with the untouched chess games sitting on the VP's desk. What do you think you are, Homeland? Lost?

Completely normal, happy person Andy Bernard. (NBC)

3. Two shows took detours to visit Gettysburg last season: Homeland and The Office. Coincidence? What could the battlefield represent for the two shows? Who had a worse reason for making the trip, Sgt. Brody or Andy Bernard?

What was Andy's reason for going to Gettysburg again? Oh yeah, something about building team spirit. Which was kind of the opposite of Sgt. Brody's take on Joshua Chamberlain, which was all about sacrificing yourself for the common good. Also to pick up a bomb vest, which apparently could only be manufactured in Gettysburg? I guess  if someone came knocking about all those old-timey ballistics you were making in your Muslim-owned gun store in Gettysburg, you could say they were for Civil War re-enactors.

In conclusion, the hallowed ground in Pennsylvania where the seminal battle between the North and the South was fought is either a testament to the triumph of brothers-in-arms over adversity, or to how long a recognizable war hero running for office can stand creepily still at a national military park without his behavior being flagged as odd. (Good thing Dana had her secret surveillance app on. Who needs Virgil when you have a 16-year-old girl with an iPhone?)

4. Is the portrayal of Islam in Homeland, in which it is both a spur to violence and a source of beauty and comfort, subtle and nuanced? Or is the show just 24 with a superficial gloss of balance, trying to have it both ways—keeping our sympathy for Brody while still using Muslims as the show's scary enemy? Is the show now raising the specter of an actual "secret Muslim" in the White House to feed off conservative fears or to poke fun at them? (And if the former, does that make us sympathize more with Jessica Brody?)

5. The final scene, burying the Koran, seems beautiful and tender, but it also calls to mind Brody's burial of Walker last season. Unpack some of the resonances here between those early scenes of pain and humiliation on the one hand and Brody's deceit, Jessica's desecration or Dana's near-outing of her father on the other. Does the fact that Walker was in fact still alive at the time mitigate or deepen these connections?

Oh, mitigate, for sure. Fuck Walker. That was such a poorly written character, in my opinion, because we had no idea what was driving him. At least with Brody you had his deep connection with Issa and the knowledge that the Vice President Walden and the head of the CIA and the Secretary of Defense--not all of America, mind you--needed to be held accountable. But what was Walker's motivation? He was just this killing machine for Nazir, and we're given no explanation about why. Stockholm Syndrome? I don't buy it. He was just the T-1000 to Brody's Terminator, and I'm glad he and his total non-character are dead now. I think Brody would have happily taken out Walker even if Nazir hadn't told him to. Because in his mind, at least, Brody is not a terrorist. He doesn't believe in collateral damage the way Walker and Nazir do, at least assuming that everyone in the season finale was somehow involved in giving the OK to the drone strike.

As for Jessica, part of me wants to be like "Stop being so intolerant, lady!" And a second part of me wants to tell her to stop changing her hair because it's making me jealous how many looks she can pull off. And there's a third, small sliver that thinks I'd react in the exact same way, because this is the shit she was talking about when she was trying to convince Brody not to run for office.

Bonus question: How much does Damien Lewis look like Shooter McGavin from Happy Gilmore?