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If you have asked me to guess which two episodes Bryan Cranston would pick as his two "favorites" from Breaking Bad (so far) there's a good chance I would have picked out the exact two he ended up picking for us to watch at The Film Society of Lincoln Center last night, which is doing a week-long tribute to the show here on the precipice of its final run of episodes. The first one that Cranston chose was "Phoenix," and the second one was "Fly." I won't say what the episodes are about lest I spoil anybody (Breaking Bad is the kind of show I'd feel awful spoiling for anybody) but the episodes are actually intrinsically tied to one another, even though they're a full season apart, and they both give Cranston tons of notes to play. (Granted you could say that about pretty much every single episode of Breaking Bad - Walter White is a complicated chap.) They're two of the most memorable episodes from the series' run - big things go down in both. I really love "Phoenix," I think it's one of the most well-structured, well-written, most devastating episodes of TV ever. "Fly" was directed by Rian Johnson and feels a little too in love with itself and its own cleverness, but the one-two punch of monologues from Cranston and Aaron Paul towards the end are pretty amazing.
Alright I didn't intend for this to turn into a television review - I guess I'm just oh let's say balls-to-the-wall enthusiastic about the show coming back on soon, and so a little tongue-lapping's in order. Really I just wanted to post these shots from the Q&A with Cranston last night and do my jig about getting to see him in person. I don't really have anything to share from the Q&A - it was a lot of conversation about actorly process and I don't find that conversation very interesting. I wanted ribald stories from the set! Alas.
I also saw RJ Mitte and Anna Gunn while I was waiting in line for this (they did a Q&A for an earlier panel) and you can read my respective tweets here and here.
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3 comments:
Did he really pick the episodes? He seemed not to know which episodes had been screened when he got on stage, and wasn't sure which episode Phoenix was - or was that all a joke that I was too obtuse to catch on to?
Regardless, they were extremely well chosen by whoever chose them. Totally agreed on Fly too, btw.
Good point, Roark. I wondered that myself. I don't think it was a joke, either. I was semi-willing to believe maybe he'd just picked the episodes awhile ago and forgotten, but then they were such perfectly chosen pair it does feel like somebody else maybe made the picking. Dunno! Relatedly I wish that he'd been able to speak more specifically towards what we'd just seen, instead of the broad chat about his general acting process, but then I never want to listen to that conversation; it's why I don't watch Inside the Actor's Studio and this felt like an episode of that most of the time. At least he never used the word "craft."
It really did. I groaned a little when he asked, "Are there any actors here?" Huge warning sign, though I didn't end up minding a lot of the process talk that followed. But I wanted him to talk more about the individual episodes too. I liked his anecdote about how the specific staging of the ending of Phoenix came about. And the "robots?" exchange from 4 Days Out. I wanted a lot more of that kind of thing.
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