Luck: HBO series: David Milch, Dustin Hoffman, Michael Mann

lol forgot the wire

in my defence, that was nearly 100 blog years ago

oz was before blogs even existed!

slock, check your gmail

treme is great, y'all are high

The 2006 film "Miami Vice," a remake of the television show with very little evidence of that heritage, was seen as a creative misstep, and it grossed a lukewarm $164 million worldwide (its production budget was $135 million).

guess the LA Times doesn't read the blogosphere.

Also ya'll are crazy. Treme was great, Deadwood is the best show ever made, Rome was solid fun, In Treatment has been very good, and Boardwalk Empire is just now finding it's legs.

rome was awesome

what was the last good hbo drama? feels like the answer is arli$$

BTW, in that UPenn link up above, Milch reads the pilot script for Luck (reads all the parts and the directions and everything) and it's good.

They just put up a Q&A with Milch at the LA Times:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/showtracker/2010/10/david-milch-hopes-for-visceral-experience-with-hbos-luck.html

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/f71b5774-dd62-11df-beb7-00144feabdc0.html

next movie projects are battle of agincourt and 50s chicago gangsters

Another Michael Mann interview

Oops, same link as caek.

David Milch and Michael Mann are two of the most imposing intellects and autodidacts in the biz, so the notion of them collaborating is almost mind-boggling.

I would kill a man if it would ensure that Agincourt gets made.

this could be good.

btw walter hill directed by the pilot of deadwood, which had some extraordinary moments. where did that guy's career go, though?

― by another name (amateurist), Wednesday, March 3, 2010 5:32 PM (7 months ago) Bookmark

For some reason I thought Walter Hill was dead... guess I was thinking of George Roy Hill.

Can you really call Milch an autodidact when he graduated from Yale? Unless you're saying he's like... a student of life or something.

do people still watch treme? i liked it at first but had like a physical aversion to watching it. same with boardwalk empire. it just feels exhausting.

― cathy: ACK-er (s1ocki), Tuesday, October 12, 2010 10:00 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark

I felt the exact same way about Treme... I think the scene where Bunk gets his teeth knocked out by a cop really made me realize how enormously unpleasant watching the show made me feel. Boardwalk's airier and more fun to me though, even if it's way more violent and gross.

the 67-year-old filmmaker has shown a profound gift for connecting human emotion, music, color and light on the big screen

lol trying to write abt wtf michael mann is up to

from the article:

Luck is the latest example of talent from the big screen crossing over to TV and boasts a cast that includes Dustin Hoffman, playing a seasoned gambler, Nick Nolte and Dennis Farina, a former cop Mann first worked with 22 years ago on his TV series Crime Story.

didn't they first work together on Thief?

i waited on treme until i could watch the whole season in one week and it felt like a massive perfect movie.

you mean massively boring imperfect boo-vie

sorry, yes, that's clearly what i mean.

np

man I thought this was supposed to start airing in January. now they're saying autumn of 2011.

got to side w/team slocki over team forks when it comes to tremé, sorry john

tremé was awful, overbearing forcefeeing of david simon's BIG VIEWS. i feared boardwalk empire had a similar level of heaviness/tediousness (i didn't watch episode 2 till this week) but i love it now, it is worth sticking with.

overestimating the BIG VIEWS argument of Treme imo.

but i think when your mouthpiece commits suicide it is an intentional complication of those big views.

David Milch is a total school of life autodidact. That New Yorker profile is one of the most fascinating things I've ever read. The guy's a genius, and I almost got the impression the Ivy League had more to gain from him than he it.

Here's a taste:

[Robert Penn] Warren had arranged for Milch to begin teaching seminars in fiction and poetry at Yale that year and to work on a two-volume textbook anthology of American literature that he and Lewis were editing with Cleanth Brooks. It didn’t take Milch long to acquire a cult following; his classroom style was vibrant, earthy, and often derisively funny, and details of his avocational exploits enhanced his mystique. For instance, he was a gambler who knew a great deal about horse racing and was writing a screenplay set at a racetrack. (Were his students also aware that he was an alcoholic and a heroin addict?) Depending on how one interprets the data, Milch was either bedevilled by self-destructive urges or possessed of keen survival skills that sustained him in the face of unhealthy compulsions. A superior student—he graduated summa cum laude and won the prize given for the highest achievement in English—he was an unlikely member of the jock fraternity (Delta Kappa Epsilon; George W. Bush, president), which provided a venue for his main extracurricular activity: drinking.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/02/14/050214fa_fact_singer

Some great Milch stuff at The Idea of the Writer. His lectures tend to be more about his experiences than anything else, but they're still enjoyable. I seem to remember really liking the USC Religious course one myself.

In fact that might be place where he discusses John from Cincinnati being about preventing genocide through mercantilism.

man, i would say treme is three (3) times as good as john from cincinnati
and (almost?) as good as deadwood

Dude, Treme is nowhere near Deadwood quality. Deadwood was just a zillion times more entertaining, the only thing that kept me watching Treme was the great cast, and I doubt there's any force of nature that could get me to watch a second, John Goodman-less season.

shrug

Deadwood is the greatest show of all time. Treme is very good, but it's about equal with John from Cincinnati (though for different reasons). Treme has a lot of potential and a great community vibe, so I think it's worth sticking with.

the Cult of Milch makes me a little suspicious/skeptical, honestly. i liked deadwood a lot but it was really pretentious, and some episodes just didn't work. it felt like twin peaks levels of bad-with-the-good sometimes.

pretty sure it wasn't 'the greatest show of all time.' it had a couple of the same flaws as 'boardwalk empire' -- gratingly 'upscale' violence against women, bit slow -- though obviously it pisses all over 'boardwalk empire' [via ian mcshane crushing it].

How many dramatic TV shows have been better than Deadwood? You could probably count them on one hand. I'm not saying it was perfect, but 'pretentious' doesn't really scan as a great criticism to me, or at least not one that I really care about. I mean, I don't have anything really interesting to say about the show except that I liked it a whole lot, but is pretention really bad if the show is still massively entertaining? Is it really a lot more pretentious than The Wire? That's a show which I love but also found much more wearying with its laser-like focus on being an IMPORTANT show about IMPORTANT things. I guess either it works for you or it doesn't.

i'd put deadwood in top ten tv dramas

I think Deadwood is very enjoyable on a surface level. I don't know what's pretentious about that. John from Cincinnati was probably pretty pretentious though. Also 'upscale violence against women' - yawn.

deadwood was amazing but it's lack of a conclusion hurts the series as a whole I feel, or think; I mean I never finished watching it once it got cancelled. maybe I should.

I think HBO has had a solid run with dramas again lately. Boardwalk Empire and Treme are both excellent.

It's a shame that Deadwood got cancelled, but it was hugely successful at what it wanted to do during its run, so I can't hold anything against them. Even the third season, which I found to be unsatisfying first time through, improves immeasurably upon second viewing.

The last shot is pretty depressing, which sort of flies against the optimism of the series, but it's fitting in its own way.

i liked the first season of deadwood okay but i couldnt really get into the 2nd. mcshane was great, but i felt like i had enough.

did u watch the third

no should i

tbh i thought most of dude's "shakespearean command of language" was a lot of lorem ipsum mumbo-jumbo

ha, yes, i'm listening to these idea of the writer lectures and most of the sentences remind me of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorless_green_ideas_sleep_furiously

Season 3's the worst so I dunno if I could recommend it to someone who was sick of the show by s2, but there's some cool stuff in there... like one of the most memorable fight scenes I've ever seen on film or tv.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=un1XLmK84Vw