Remember that enchanting kid from Billy Elliot? So earnest and physical and compelling…Those traits serve actor Jamie Bell still, now all grown up and starring of AMC’s Revolutionary War spy drama Turn. In it a Loyalist young man is pressured into a spy errand for the Patriots, an act that sets a number of gears turning within him and within the wheels of General Washington’s war machine.
The story of season one is young Abraham Woodhull’s efforts to resist the tugs of his Loyalist father and of his Patriot friends, of his efforts to be his own man on his own terms–terms that change slowly but force, like a gathering storm. What is especially satisfying is how Abraham rides that storm, wrestles to command it rather than merely be swept up in it, how he comes to make allegiances without ever quite relenting in the self-determinism that is his most singular personality trait.
Turn is particularly strong in its ability to make 18th century life both recognizable–full of real people, not national heroes nor prim puritans–and newly alive with texture. While I sometimes find the variety of settler New Yorkers’ accents befuddling, for instance, it is a welcome reminder of the recent immigrant status of some colonists and of the distance between the English we speak and what they would have spoken. Continue reading Secret Worth Exposing: The Riveting Spies of AMC’s Turn
on a loop in the background of Xfinity on demand. In it a young man darts his eyes around nervously in a subway car, expressing his feeling of paranoia in demeanor as well as voiceover. Then the tension breaks as a voice inside the car interrupts his inner monologue. The voice of a decade’s worth of Panasonic commercials and before that the voice of 90s teen misanthropy: the voice of Christian Slater.
RemotePossibilities 