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"      You know that recent episode of Mad Men where Jim&amp;#039;s doctor gets everybody at SCDPCGC high on some kind of stimulant concoction, and then the office spends the weekend making up bogus pitch ideas and hallucinating childhood memories and tap-dancing and basically just tripping out? Okay, now picture that same general feeling of disorientation and the sense that the script is being hammered out in the throes of an all-night ether binge, imagine it several degrees darker and more perplexing, and try to visualize it directed like an out-there episode of Breaking Bad, especially those trick shots they love to do where the camera is moving around while attached to, like, a shovel or a safety deposit box or whatever. Now imagine all of that in a movie that&amp;#039;s almost 50 years old.  John Frankenheimer&amp;#039;s Seconds \u2014 which was just picked up for release by the prestigious Criterion Collection and will be available on DVD and Blu-ray August 13 \u2014 was released in 1966, but it would look years ahead of its time even if it were released next week. It was groundbreaking for a lot of reasons, but there still isn&amp;#039;t much that looks or feels anything like it. You may know Frankenheimer as the director of a much more famous movie from the 1960s, the iconic political thriller The Manchurian Candidate, about a plot to brainwash an American soldier and transform him into an assassin. Seconds is also about a sort of conspiratorial intrigue, but this time the principal threat isn&amp;#039;t anything so fanciful as a lurking communist menace or the machinations of a corrupt government \u2014 in fact the major conspiracy at the heart of the film is simply the American dream. Seconds is about Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph), a middle-class investment banker living in a nice suburban home with a nice wife he barely talks to and a nice daughter he never sees. From the start, it seems like a funhouse mirror version of American Beauty, or maybe Revolutionary Road as directed by David Lynch\u2014think blown-out black-and-white photography shot through fisheye lenses and unconventional camera rigs, so that the camera goes from hovering around at feet-level to being attached to a character&amp;#039;s shoulders. And this is all before the movie takes a nosedive into insanity, when the vaguely dissatisfied banker finds himself at a meeting with a creepy secret company promising potential clients a new life. As it turns out, they mean their offer quite literally: When Hamilton buys in, they fake his death, cash in on the life insurance policy, and put him through a full-body plastic surgery procedure that switches John Randolph out for a more strapping Rock Hudson.  This is when things get particularly dark. The mystery company has arranged a new dream life for Hamilton, setting him up as an established painter with a luxurious beachfront property, a host of new friends, and a sexy girlfriend who falls for him instantly. He even gets a live-in butler and personal spirit guide, though that element of his life quickly begins to look like Big Brother rather than a benign helping hand. Through all of this change \u2014 from a dour existence to an ostensibly perfect one \u2014 Hamilton doesn&amp;#039;t get any happier. The movie itself, incredibly, gets even stranger, culminating in two party scenes that make jovial celebrations look like the very epitome of existential terror. It&amp;#039;s achieves exactly what Mad Men hopes to. The AMC series has spent six seasons trying to sell us the idea that our pursuit of material happiness is a crap deal, but in under two hours, Seconds tells you that even if it were possible to start fresh and have anything you want, you&amp;#039;d still be fked. That&amp;#039;s terrifying. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a18658/seconds-movie-criterion/>