Louie (Louis C.K.'s show on FX)

loved the implicit echo of louie's map for a date, too; taking somebody to the same place, such a beautiful thread to draw.

louis' performance during the argument scene so next level, also. performances are just out of sight. pamela being just awful. amazing.

man pamela wasn't so awful, louis was such a jerk to her. :'(

love pamela so much, every line of pamela's dialogue so brutal

ps straight tingling at riding elephants

Jane is a really, really good actress

Also exceptionally well-directed, I think. The quote upthread about getting a kid to act high illuminated that side of this for me. That scene where Louie and Jane are sitting on the bench after she's been sent home from school, those aren't a kid's mannerisms, they've clearly thought about every aspect, every hand gesture, to give her that mix of wise-beyond-her-years and typical naive kid acting up.

both those kids are great, I love how they both have very well-defined personalities even though they're both minor (hehe) characters. they're both great actors.

man pamela wasn't so awful, louis was such a jerk to her. :'(

― Merdeyeux

Nah I thought she was being worse.

loved the implicit echo of louie's map for a date, too; taking somebody to the same place, such a beautiful thread to draw.

even better, if i'm not mistaken he took her to the place that he was introduced to by parker posey in an earlier season (sorry, i always forget what happened in which season). there's a circulation of happiness there that's quite lovely. even if some of his montages remind me a little too much of woody allen with the jazz music etc. (he's obviously very deeply influenced by allen but he also seems to me to transcend almost every limitation that woody allen had, mostly notably by actually confronting some issues that allen is content to ignore or just talk around.)

pamela was being awful, there's no way to retroactively put ironic quote marks around something as cruel as "dating somebody? nobody wants to be with you, louie!" and for a moment, after he mistakes the hungarian woman's realism for rejection, he thinks she's just been proven right. even in a more general sense she's being selfish--she comes back after not having communicated (one presumes) with louie for several months, and expects that he's in the same place, and she can just kind of take over his life where she had left it. she should have treaded more lightly. tbh that whole scene hit kind of close to home.

the daughters are really incredible actresses, and louis ck is a great director of them. it is rare that you get child performers who create such distinct presences without it just being the usual sort of child-actor precocity.

the show has hit a very sober vein lately, despite all the jokes. not as much screwing around with continuity and the limits of realism. i'm sure he'll get back to that a bit; the defining aspect of this show, aside from louis's screen personality, is its unpredictability, owing to the take that louis can just do whatever the fuck he wants. he really is making use of the freedoms he's been granted (or those he's seized).

what a nice show. also very nice to see eszter balint again, she was the best thing about stranger than paradise.

that said i rarely have an urge to watch episodes of this show a second time, why is that?

You only ever want to see a magic trick once

Didn't the daughter's violin just magically appear in the last ep?

Also the woman Jane tormented

was that an adult actress playing a kid? or was she supposed to have tormented a teacher?

- it was a teacher she was meant to have pulled the skirt from
- & naw, we've seen jane practice violin before, iirc w/louis telling her to shut up

btw to amend & make amends for my previous righteous Naw-ing, i was kinda wrong about the history of actors playing louie's wife; there was a scene really early on in which you saw a disembodied arm sign a divorce contract. white arm. for all the correct talk of it being a fun & audacious thing to do, casting wise, i do think it's also a pretty elegant solution to dealing with some of the issues around portraying a biographically-accurate ex-wife of actual-louis-ck.

love your post, anyway, amateurist; i have the same feeling, of at once feeling compelled to try to go back & see the episode again & then not doing so, maybe knowing part of it was the unfurling, the slow alignment of what ends up being a focal point.

& wrt the sober tone; it's really interesting what he's dedicating space to. there are scenes that haven't been mentioned, here, like louie having basically narratively irrelevant quarrels with his brother, or he & his ex reaching for phones in the teacher's office, without it even being played so dramatically as a punchline. like i think mapping out those parameters of his life is a really big part of the subsequent effect the show's able to achieve. proposing to smashing up pianos to grinning. feels so real.

I'm not really a fan of the black ex-wife conceit, it takes me out of the show too much.

Is the bang-bang guy supposed to be his brother?

Yes

Ah, I wouldn't let my best friend sit on my couch sopping wet like that but if I had a brother

I have totally forgotten the plot/story behind Louie's wife from Lucky Louie (see I don't even remember her character's name on this show)

its her irl name right? pamela

btw this ep with the hurricane killing lebron james, all the miami heat, and 12 million other people goddamn dying

pam adlon is the co-producer of the show. and the voice of bobby hill from king of the hill (among a bunch of other things).

i would really like a translation of amia's hungarian break up speech.

I'm not really a fan of the black ex-wife conceit, it takes me out of the show too much.

― the joke should be over once the kid is eaten. (chap), Thursday, May 22, 2014 10:32 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what is wrong with you. there is no conceit. he cast an actress to play his ex-wife. that actress is black.

do you not want actresses to have jobs if they are not white

i hate literally all criticism of this show & so will ruin this thread myopically defending it but i can't watch two episodes of this without being so freshly reminded of just the feeling of being alive, of life & the space between people; the argument and the violin scene are exquisite examples of this & weariness with this, as if it's always achieved by the same means or else is some kind of party trick, is kind of mindblowing to me

― schlump, Tuesday, May 20, 2014 10:26 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this this this this this

also, charles grodin got OLD

Todd Barry's fucking face when he gets the donut.

"For $800 we could just have Jane killed"

...

...

...

...

*chuckle*

::cut to black::

The editing on this show is tremendous

from reddit via facebook:

to Jim Norton in the club:

Amia: Nagyon hülye vagy! Kicsit se vagy vicces!
(Amia translated: You are very stupid. And not funny at all!)

Last scene of ep.8
while in bed: "this was a big mistake. we ruined a good thing we had. do you understand?"
as she is getting up: "we'll fix it somehow"
walking out the door: "everything will be alright""

thanks

what is wrong with you. there is no conceit. he cast an actress to play his ex-wife. that actress is black.

do you not want actresses to have jobs if they are not white

To clarify it's purely because their kids are white that I find it distracting. I'd feel exactly the same way if a show cast a white woman as the biological mother of black children FWIW.

Why is it distracting though

todd barry strand of this was just so much fun

it was such a todd barry bit too i was cackling from start to finish

Don't think I quite knew what a 'shit-eating grin' meant til I saw his sequence

would be very surprised if that wasn't an adaptation of an actual todd barry story

so the flashback, where they decided to get divorced and had sex one last time - is that the wife with whom he had his kids, and is now divorced, and with whom he's trying to sort out jane's issues with school?

i think so.

the younger guy playing younger louis had louis ck's mannerisms and way of speaking down pat

yes, that's louis and his ex-wife

cool. he was definitely a good young-louis.

the pacing and framing of this show is unlike anything else. It's not always funny but it's... something

what makes louie brilliant is that louis knows there's greater things than LOLs

uh, a lot of people who don't have as much talent as louis c.k. know that.

The flashback sequence would have been amazing/perfect were it not for the last line. Like, we get that it's Lily's conception already.

it thought wasn't just exposition, though. it actually made her laugh, which is important to louis because she usually denies him that connection/approval. she was fighting it in that "for $800..." scene because that's like giving in for her; it breaks the tension in their dynamic.

"i thought," i meant to say.

slugbuggy otm

I generally like this show but I watched the louis'-daughter-nearly-walk-in-front-of-a-subway-train episode last night and it was so boring. The bit with the russian lady getting trapped in a lift was pretty formulaic farce as well.

she didn't nearly walk in front of a subway train

ok i tuned in at the point where he was giving out to her about it