omar!

Okay, so I'm the most contrarian fuck who ever lived, and it's taken me something like eight years to finally watch The Wire. I know this is perverse. I am kind of like an otter at the zoo who needs to search for her herrings embedded in a block of ice hidden behind some ferns; I don't always do well when the herrings are tossed right at me. Anyhow, I'm eating my yummy herring now and am exactly mid-way through season three NOBODY SPOIL ANYTHING and am pretty in love with Omar. Or the idea of Omar. (Also: having a lot of Maryland flashbacks. When they were driving through PG County in season one I plotzed.)

I love this scene. It does a disservice, in a way, cool as it is, to show it out of context, because a lot of the power it has comes from how it rises from the scenes around it, but it's still great. I love how it's shot, I love the you just see his legs first, how the sound and tempo changes the closer he gets, how he emerges from the ambient chaos in all his power and in people's reactions. Plus the "Fair enough" at the end kills me! Nothing fair about it. Except in Omar's code.

The Wire from mike mikey on Vimeo.