Showing posts with label Jon Hamm. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jon Hamm. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Jon Hamm: I am worried about this boy





(From the Washington Post. I've long wondered if Hamm's ability to inhabit the tortured soul of Don Draper is connected to some torment in his own soul. This, apparently, answers my question.)

Jon Hamm exits rehab for alcoholism before ‘Mad Men’ final season premiere





Jon Hamm as Don Draper in “Mad Men.” (Michael Yarish/AMC via AP)


After a 30-day stay, “Mad Men” star Jon Hamm has been released from a rehabilitation center where he sought treatment for alcohol addiction.

“With the support of his longtime partner Jennifer Westfeldt, Jon Hamm recently completed treatment for his struggle with alcohol addiction,” a spokesman for Hamm said in a statement, as the Associated Press reported. “They have asked for privacy and sensitivity going forward.”

After a long struggle in Hollywood, Hamm, 44, became famous in 2007 for playing alcoholic, womanizing Don Draper on the landmark AMC series. He won a Golden Globe in 2008 for the role, and has been nominated for an acting Emmy seven times.

TMZ reported that Hamm completed a program at Silver Hill Hospital in New Canaan, Conn., at the end of February. The publication called it a “high-end facility,” and the hospital is affiliated with Yale University.

After an eight-year run, “Mad Men’s” final season will air this spring.





“There’s no version of this ending that is not super painful for me,” Hamm said last year, as The Washington Post’s Hank Stuever reported. “[‘Mad Men’] has been a single constant of my creative life in the last decade, so that’s kind of tough. Yeah, I will be happy when [the final episodes] air and I don’t have to fake like I don’t know how the show ends [but] I will never be able to have this again, and that’s a drag.”

[Jon Hamm and others discuss a ‘super painful’ (but ‘satisfying’) end to ‘Mad Men’ at TV press tour]

In the past, Hamm has tried to draw a bright line between himself and the character he plays on television.

“There is no Don Draper,” he told Esquire last year. “Don Draper was blown up in a ditch in Korea. That whole ‘Be Don Draper’ thing, I feel it’s … sad.”

He added: “This is a fundamentally f—– up human being.”





But some quickly drew a line between the real man and the ad executive who specializes in behaving badly. Deadline Hollywood called Hamm’s trip to rehab “a surreal case of life imitating art.”

“The news does change the narrative in the final promotional push for AMC’s celebrated first original series,” Nellie Andreeva wrote. “It also raises the question about the toll of playing an anti-hero.”

Andreeva pointed out another case of an actor who perhaps got too deep into a role: the late James Gandolfini. After Gandolfini first inhabited New Jersey mob boss Tony Soprano on “The Sopranos,” which debuted in 1999, his personal life seemed to get worse. He got divorced. There were problems with drugs. He would disappear from the set. And he reportedly once punched himself in the face.





“Turning Tony — anxiety-prone dad, New Jersey mobster, suburban seeker of meaning — into a millennial pop-culture icon, the character’s frustration, volatility, and anger had often been indistinguishable from those qualities of James Gandolfini, the actor who brought them to life,”GQ wrote after the actor’s death at age 51 in 2013. “It was a punishing role, requiring not only vast amounts of nightly memorization and long days under hot lights, but also a daily descent into Tony’s psyche—at the best of times, a worrisome place to dwell; at the worst, ugly, violent, and
sociopathic.”






I can't help but note a fundamental change in the things Jon Hamm is saying to the press. In the past, he was almost glib about Don Draper, as if he was a vehicle - classy, if a little cracked and broken in places - that would take him far. At one point an interviewer asked him, "Do you think Don Draper can find happiness?" His response was, "Oh, of course! Why not? Anything is possible," or words to that effect.

I've been a Maddict since the show began in 2007, and while last season kind of slid sideways, there was still much to recommend it. Don's chronic desperation was beginning to get old, almost frayed, as was the character himself. Those message boards plumbing hidden symbols in the show (and Don is a good plumber, by the way, fixing the ineffectual Pete Campbell's leaky faucet) seemed a bit too much for me however. EVERY atom of EVERY episode was analyzed - oh, Don could be like Don Corleone! Or Dawn - the dawning of a new day? Draper - obviously, he has draped himself to hide his real identity, and if you take the d away, you have "raper"! We won't get into Dick Whitman, except that Dick is a penis and Whitman is a folksy/literary allusion to Walt Whitman. And so on, and so on, ad nauseam.




But I was still drawn back again and again. I don't know if I have a favorite episode because the show, more so than most,  is all of a piece. I just saw, for maybe the fourth time, the one where Don has to fire Lane Pryce for embezzlement. It's particularly powerful because of Don's reaction: straightforward, not shocked nor apologetic, but with absolutely no room for discussion. You're out of here, Lane, I can't trust you any more - and he's right. It's hard to feel much sympathy for this cloying, blithering Englishman who tries to commit suicide in a "Jag-yew-ar" that won't start, but when the staff find him hanging dead in his office, Don once again shows a kind of low-key integrity by insisting on cutting him down, honoring the body in a way that reflects his wartime experience, no matter how flawed.

Re-watching these still-watchable things, which I really wasn't going to watch, but I recorded them anyway, I once more got lost in the labyrinth. Fortunately the episodes wear well, better than I thought they ever could. Even knowing exactly what came next, I was drawn in. Again.




One of my favorite characters - maybe my absolute favorite - is Sally, whose odyssey has taken her from chubby eight-year-old girl ballet dancing for guests in the living room to fiery, rebellious young woman, someone who conveys a brokenness that she will somehow parlay into an extraordinary life. She has always been a Daddy's girl, but has seen much of Daddy's dark side, which is very dark and murky indeed. She watched Lee Harvey Oswald get shot, screamed when Don scored tickets to the Beatles, got her first period in the Museum of Natural History and ran home to her mother, jumping over years of alienation and emotional abandonment for an understanding and comfort which, against the odds, she did receive.  Sally and I are the same age, which took me a while to realize. She's experiencing all the madness of the 1960s through the eyes of a smart but confused, often emotionally-deprived child. And where else can you find a character like that, one who is allowed to develop in so many directions, with so many dimensions, over a period of eight years?




I do hope the series winds up with a little more dignity than was displayed in the last few episodes, which in many ways sucked. I groaned at some of it - Ken Cosgrove's meaningless tap dance seems to have hit a new low. It was a mistake to take the series into the beginning of the '70s, when all that Rat Pack coolness had worn off and people were into long greasy hair, sideburns and polyester leisure suits. And everyone's wondering what will happen to Don. Will they kill him off? (That would once and for all eliminate the possibility of Mad Men II: The Adventures of Disco Don.) Will he become hap-hap-happy at last? Will he realize all those flashbacks to the old homestead were a complete fiction (as witness the fact that the young Dick Whitman looks more like Alfred E. Neuman than Don)? I would be happy if they killed off the repulsive, non-acting Glen, Matthew Weiner's talentless, creepy son, who has blighted the show and pulled down the quality of it for many seasons now.




Last episodes are a stumbling block for long-running, epic series. Most of them fumble, drop the ball. St. Elsewhere was ludicrous, with the whole series being the dream of an autistic boy. The Sopranos turned all the lights out or something (I didn't watch), stopping in mid-conversation and leaving everyone hanging. Seinfeld just had a ridiculous jailhouse scene that seemed to be punishing the characters for being too entertaining all those years. It was a long time ago, but I think MASH squeezed it a little too hard, so it came out almost as maudlin as the excruciating ending of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. And Sex and the City - dear God - talk about Don Draper! Carrie returned to the wealthy, powerful, smooth sociopath Big after he had mangled her heart a hundred times - and everyone cried and clapped their hands - it was sickening, but no more sickening/completely irrelevant than the two movies that followed.




We'll keep our expectations low, or maybe we'll have no expectations at all. But we'll watch. I don't think we'll find it as hard to say goodbye to it all as Jon Hamm, who seems to be at a fragile point right now. He speaks in another article about Don Draper building his house on a crumbling foundation. It alarmed me, because I wondered if the brokenness in him was being laid bare by playing a deeply broken character for so long. I was even more alarmed reading about James Gandolfini - I confess I never watched The Sopranos, but I hated to see what happened to him when the show got hold of him.

Actors become. Don't they? Do the best of them stay separate from their work? Can they? And how do you do that, exactly? Why would anyone need to anaesthetize and numb themselves with booze to the point of needing rehab? Doesn't this point to a pain and a pressure approaching the unbearable load Don Draper has carried for eight years?

For if Don's fundamental nature is one of integrity, as that one episode seems to indicate, how and why has he trespassed against himself that many times, and survived?















"You had me at hello"

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!





Thursday, May 9, 2013

Jon Hamm, the Kent-Smoking Man





I think we may have walked this way before. But it's time to walk it again. This is the Kent Man, with the gleaming skyscrapers of Madison Avenue towering above him. Though the ad copy refers to "scientists and educators", my first thought was, "Like fuck!  He's an ad man."

The ad is circa sometime in the early '60s, when medical experts were beginning to grumble about the negative health effects of smoking. Imagine the panicked discussions in boardrooms across the nation! "How are we going to put a positive spin on this so people think it's GOOD for them to smoke?" One astonishing television ad from the era had a bellicose man with a cigarette in his mouth proclaiming, "I want a treat, not a treatment."

Unfortunately, his "treat" all too often DID lead to a "treatment", usually received too late.






The ad guy puffing away on his Kent ("For the best combina-tion of fil-ter and good taste/Kent satisfies best!" went the cheery little jingle) looks so startlingly like Don Draper of Mad Men, it's downright eerie. I wondered if I could get Don's head into the Kent ad, and was almost successful.






Of course it's never perfect. Head shape and angle, skin color, all that stuff, will never match up exactly.
Besides, in the ad the guy is looking up, squinting actually, in a cool Madison Avenue sort of way.







Kind of like this? Looks a bit like Rod Serling on a bad day. One eye looks more or less OK (these are the Kent Man's eyes, by the way) but the other one, well. . . It would have been best to have that eye in shadow, but I don't have those kind of skills.






Here Don stares into nothingness in his typical God-how-misunderstood-I-am-because-I-was-poorly-mothered-if-in-fact-I-was-ever-mothered-at-all expression. I guess he stares at the sidewalk when he lights up.





DEFINITELY not mothered. At all. Ever.

Plus it looks like he's going to throw up.






This is my personal favorite. His hands have suddenly turned into brown oven mitts, but never mind.
At least he looks happy.







Friday, July 20, 2012

Don Draper and the shifty scientist



There's nothing I love more than old ads (except maybe old cartoons), and this one just reached out and grabbed me. Pure sixties nostalgia, sleek and sophisticated, which of course reminds me of my all-time-favorite TV series. . .


Et voila. This took very little photoshopping, was the exact size and head angle, and had a similar attitude of kibuki-like enigma. Don's in a little more contemplative mood than our "scientist and educator", who has the shiftyiness of someone who's about to blow up Cleveland. But they are oh-so-the-same: the skyscraper background, the clean boxes full of statistics giving the whole thing an air of - what? Of not-rotting-your-body-out-with-horrendous-cancerous-tumors-that-kill-you-before-you're-40?

Don's particular about his Luckys, but for the sake of the ad he must have been persuaded to switch. Now, wouldn't that be something - Don actually DOING ads? Posing for ads, I mean? Isn't he perfect? Isn't he the most amazing - I mean, he's the kind of guy who just smells good. Nothing more to say about it.

Sunday, March 25, 2012

MAD MEN RETURNS (a tribute to the most beautiful man on earth)


Who’s the advertisin' genius that's happenin' in Manhattan town
Tearin' up the chicks with the message that he lays down






Who is the coolest guy that turns us all on
Fast talkin', slow walkin', good lookin' Draper (Don)

Chicks are makin' reservations for his lovin' so fine
Screamin' and a-faintin', he has got 'em all waitin' in line

Who is the cat whose lovin’ just goes on and on
Fast talkin', slow walkin', good lookin' Draper (Don!)

Chicks are makin' reservations for his lovin' so fine
Screamin' and faintin', he has got 'em all waitin' in line

Who is the coolest guy (he turns me on)
Fast talkin', slow walkin', good lookin' Hamm: that’s Jon
Chicks are makin' reservations for his lovin' so fine
Screamin' and faintin', he's got 'em all waitin' in line

Who is the coolest guy that is what am
Fast talkin', slow walkin', good lookin' Jon (that’s Hamm)
Fast talkin', slow walkin', good lookin' Jon (that’s Hamm)
Fast talkin', slow walkin', good lookin' Jon (that’s Hamm)

 

Friday, December 30, 2011

Mad Men gifs: I think it moved!







Geez I get mad about this. I finally gather up some truly foxy Don Draper/Jon Hamm gifs gleaned from the first four seasons of Mad Men, then find out only three of them will post here, most of them not too good.


Well, except for that first one.


Don Draper is what you'd call a good-smelling man. You know the type, you can just tell.


Harrison Ford: definitely a good-smelling man. Maybe just a touch too much cologne, but nice-smelling hair, he uses something good on it or else he just has nice-smelling hair. Just the right amount of body hair, too.


Cary Grant: Whatever men used then. He took care of himself, knew how to fill a tux.


Harold Lloyd: Of course! Lemon verbena, the rest just "him".





George Clooney: Need I say more?

Unfortunately, there are also the bad-smelling men.


Matthew McConaughey (or however you spell it): He just reeks, like a skunk. He has admitted he doesn't use deodorant and seems proud of it, though his co-stars have complained about him.


Brad Pitt: His name says it all.


Phillip Seymour Hoffman: He looks like he never washes his hair. Or other things.




Oh, enough of all that crap. *WHEN* is Season 5 of Mad Men going to start? IS it going to start? It was supposed to begin in July, for Christ's sake. JULY. That was, let me see, months ago. Then Matthew Weiner (who doesn't take pictures of his anatomy and Tweet them to his six girl friends, that's the other guy), the prima donna creator of the show, got in a major spat with the network, AMC. I think it was over commercials and having to cut a character (!?) in order to fit in more ads.


This is stupid! All they'd have to do is talk faster! And we can't afford any more leakage. They already cut Sal Romano, whose story line was finally starting to heat up after being on simmer for four years. Then he was unceremoniously dumped.

Enough about gays, I guess: the ones Don called "you people".




I was also getting very interested in pre-teen Sally, Don and Betty's daughter. She was born at the same time I was, and through her child's perception is experiencing the turbulence of the '60s (Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy assassination, Beatles on Ed Sullivan for the first time - on my tenth birthday, by the way).

She has come a long way from running around with a plastic dry cleaning bag over her head. At the end of Season 4 she was seeing a psychiatrist for masturbating at a sleepover while watching Ilya Kuryakin on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (I was a Napoleon Solo girl, myself.)

They'd better not send her away to Switzerland to deal with the embarrassment.





The thing is. . . I have this awful, queasy feeling that the show is over. There has been nothing to promote Season 5 that I've seen, except a  marathon of the first four seasons which AMC is showing at 3:00 in the morning on Sundays.


That's when they show "remastered" Three Stooges episodes from the 1940s. If there is an inverse to prime time, this is it.                                                                        

It's better than nothing, however, so 'm recording and watching them all again. I'm watching them, even though this may be the 5th or 6th time I've seen them. This has never happened to me before. I just love this show, love everything about it because so far it hasn't been even a little bit predictable or boring.

But what if it never comes back? The whole thing is so mushy. The word on the internet - which we've never been able to depend on up to now - is that it'll be back in March. MARCH?? It was February a couple minutes ago, and before that, January. And September. And. . . How can things go backwards like this?




This show has a huge fan base (or had), but the public has a very short attention span, which means it's probably already haemorrhaging viewers. It'll be a hard job to pull those numbers back up again, and if they can't, it'll be sayonara for good. Matthew Weiner will have effectively committed television suicide.

I have the DVD sets of the first four seasons. I am ashamed to admit (oh all right, I'm not) that I bought the fourth season before it officially came out. Bought it cheap from a suspicious-looking video outfit that was promptly closed down, with a forbidding-looking Homeland Security announcement appearing where the home page used to be. It went on and on about theft and fines and jail terms. Let's hope they don't catch up with me. Honest, I thought this was just a sneak preview! Never mind that it's a direct transfer from TV, with the AMC logo in the corner.

It's not good to get so addicted. It has something to do with my generation, and Sally, and the sex, and the booze, and the smoking. And with Peggy Olson, who has evolved like crazy throughout the four seasons, from mousy junior secretary to unwitting expectant mother to guilt-ridden lapsed Catholic to chicly-dressed, full-fledged copywriter with a quasi-beatnik girl friend who reminds me of Amy Farrah Fowler on The Big Bang Theory (but that's another post).




Don is on the cusp of marrying a gorgeous young secretary, someone he barely knows, mainly because she is willing to overlook his shady past and accept him the way he is. Never is there any mention of what HE intends to bring to the relationship, simply because it doesn't occur to him. She meets his needs, or is supposed to. His needs are: sex; complete erasure of his past; sex. That's why she's there. And with his kids, she's (in his words) Maria von Trapp: or, more likely, Mary Poppins.

Oh, we all have to see how this works out! Don's "secret" life is all over the place now, completely worn out like Sal Romano's secret crush on metrosexual Ken Cosgrove. So that story line will have to be discarded, unless there's more "trouble" later over that ersatz purple heart. I think they've squeezed this lemon long enough.

I wonder sometimes if this whole thing is just a ploy to titillate fans, to make them wait and wait and wait, like Betty Draper waiting for an orgasm. But it won't work. No matter how good this show is, and I happen to think it's the best thing I've ever seen, waiting isn't the viewing public's strong suit.




                                          (Whoaaaaaawwwww. Excuse me.)


Mad Men has already spawned some washed-out imitators like Pan Am and The Playboy Club (which lasted two episodes: take that, Hugh, and get back in your wheelchair). I tried to watch Pan Am because of Christina Ricci, who was an absolute genius in the two Addams Family movies. But as a "stew", she's a bust. The woman in the first episode who runs away just as her wedding is starting is so-o-o-o lame, as she sits in her friend's revving car ("What'll you do?" "I know! I'll become a Pan Am stewardess!" No kidding, that's really what she says.)



Watered-down Weiner isn't working very well. We need the real thing. We need a man who somehow smells good in spite of excessive tobacco and alcohol, who actually looks good in those stupid hats they wore. We need that time machine, that ache from an old wound (as Don once defined "nostalgia": it was when he brilliantly named an ordinary slide projector the Kodac Carousel! How do they ever get permission to do these things?)

Take me back, Don. It was all a mistake, there was never any conflict. I don't care what you've done; I don't care how many women you've snorched. All is forgiven. I need you.



Monday, April 25, 2011

Wednesday, November 17, 2010