Billions: Guns in a Pool and the False Bravado of a New Yorker

Damian Lewis, Bobby Axelrod
Source: Showtime

A slice of pizza here, a perfectly coiffed pompadour there, and badda bing badda boom Damian Lewis has transformed himself into a born and bred New Yorker. Let’s visit the ways and means by which he’s achieved the transformation, with our two most recently released promos for Billions, shall we?

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Homeland Post Brody

What, it’s been two years already since Nicholas Brody was hung from a crane in Tehran, right? Yet, he has never fully left the world of Homeland;Β he’s a ghost lingering just behind Carrie’s eyes as she makes the motions to have a normal life with someone new, and he’s ever present in the face and twirly red locks of his child Frannie. The infinitesimal hint Carrie had of happiness with a man she loved so completely has informed her every movement since then. She wants to have it again, to feel it again, and, this time, for someone who is not a terrorist bent on self-destruction. Hey, a girl can dream. And that’s all just Brody appearing in spirit. Even in body, he makes a posthumous appearance as Carrie’s hallucination in Season 4 Redux, a gratuitously excruciating and painful scene to watch. (You think I exaggerate, but, truth be told, like Carrie, I was pretty much a fetal ball crying on the floor too after that scene: “I want to believe…” gah!)

Now in Season 5, Brody makes an appearance yet again as the picture on the wall within Carrie’s eyesight all five years she was stationed in Baghdad. Let’s go back…and then forward…shall we? Forward and onward in this world created by a show that mirrors so much of the real world it’s downright eerie.

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Spa Tubs, Bodice Ripping, and Paper Fights: Billions New Clip

Alluring new Billions clipΒ came out this week and we at the blog did some alluring chatting back and forth on what it all could mean. Had every intention of putting together a pixel by pixel report: but, alas, the hours got ahead of me and all I got was two very alluring stills.(alluring…the only synonym for tantalizing I could think of πŸ™‚ ) Thus my post for you this week is a rehash of one of my first ones for Billions. Tell you one thing: every new little bit we see makes us all the more anxious to see even more. Two months to the day: Billions will be on screen!

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Coming Soon (we hope!): Our Kind of Traitor

This week brought news of Lionsgate purchasing distribution rights to one of Damian’s many projects currently “in the can” and awaiting release: Our Kind of Traitor. So this week has me veering away from my usual florid prose and simply presenting a bit of background and a small taste of what we can expect when this spy thriller, written by John Le Carre and filmed in London (and Morocco), eventually comes to our screens.

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Queen of the Desert at AFI Fest, Los Angeles

imageedit_37_8702110920On the occasion of a screening of Queen of the Desert at AFI Fest in Los Angeles on November 8, my post this week will be a mash-up of what I’ve written about the film so far.

Truth be told, Queen of the Desert has had, at best, mixed reviews everywhere it’s been screened. All signs point to the film being a rather conventionally shot story of West meets East. The muted palette with which it’sΒ filmed lends it the feeling of a world seen through a thin layer of dust. Yet while we feel the heat rise off the sand, it seems we’re also at a cold remove from the characters. Perhaps this is one of the biggest critiques of the film: that the layers of dust don’t really let us into the character’s hearts. For his part, Damian Lewis in the part of Charles Doughty-Wylie (Richard) certainly does try to convey the contents of his heart in his scenes with Nicole Kidman as Gertrude Bell.

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