In this episode, Freamon repeats “what everyone knows and no one says” as Daniels put it   Herc and Carver followed the money out of the towers and confiscated it from Wee Bey’s vehicle. One of them made a joke … Continue reading →

This episode features Omar’s haunting whistle again. I like the effect better this time – the slight echo, the dark, empty street – and the episode’s epigraph is delivered at the end Daniels explains to his wife the problem inherent … Continue reading →

  Episode 7 starts out with another parallel. The opening scene discusses the coded message from the wiretap, then the epigraph at the end of the credit sequence reads, “A man must have a code.” Bunk says the line in … Continue reading →

Episode 6 opens with Brandon’s tortured corpse sprawled across the hood of a car, for everyone in the projects to see. His death is the central point to the episode. It closes with a repeat of the image, in the … Continue reading →

I wrote a little about the use of mirrors last time around. We see some more in episode 5. The opening scene shows Avon Barksdale in the apartment of one of his girlfriends. We see him and his reflection divided … Continue reading →

In the commentary for the first episode of The Wire, David Simon said they used CGI special effects to put the towers in behind the low-rises, because they had been torn down a few years earlier. I thought of that … Continue reading →

There was this one scene is episode 3 of The Wire where the camera pans across Rawls foot up on his desk. I saw that and thought of Dean Wormer from Animal House and his famous speech about putting his … Continue reading →

Recurring themes   We’ve seen several shots of surveillance so far. Here’s one of the monitor in the office in Orlando’s. It’s only visible for a few frames as D’Angelo walks by, but it caught my attention as an example … Continue reading →

Composition The first thing I notice in the second episode is symmetry. Gant’s body is in the center. The camera moves, but mostly maintains an imperfect bilateral symmetry. The imperfections and imbalances are important, because otherwise the composition would appear … Continue reading →