Andre Royo as "Bubbles"
After watching so many episodes of “The Wire,” it’s been a little difficult for me to get into one of its verisimilitudes. Starz TV “Power” has its moments and some fine acting but once you get hooked on realistic portrayals “The Wire” is hard to beat.
It’s not for the faint of heart, of course. The show is determined to reveal life as it is in parts of Baltimore and other American cities and not the FCC sanitized version. Baltimore was a good choice for the show because it’s a port city. Boatloads of cargo come in on container ships to be unloaded by men and machines.
The old guys exaggerate their experiences of the ‘good old days’ when things were tough and real men wearing only tee-shirts in zero degree weather, unlike the 'pussies' of the modern world, could lift whole shipping containers with one hand while fighting off pirates with the other.
The longshoremen drink and swear a lot when they’re not grousing about the shrinking job opportunities. We see how it is on the loading-unloading docks where nepotism rules and the foreman’s son Ziggy is somewhat of an embarrassment when he loses an entire ‘hot’ shipping container. Okay, Ziggy is kind of a coglione, but in a show with such an undertow you need one or two of those to lighten up.
The focus on gritty repartee and private parts is part of the attraction though guys like Ziggy don’t know when to keep things zipped up. That ‘zipped up’ is in the literal sense, by the way. There’s a scene where Ziggy climbs up on the bar, unzips his pants and lets it all hang out.
