TRUE DETECTIVE on hbo - matthew mcconaughey, woody harrelson, michelle monaghan, fukunaga, pizzolatto

i'm a little surprised y'all were so taken w/ this!

i'll defend this on the merits all day but you gotta take into account most of us watched it in real time. i can still pretty vividly remember--especially after the twists and turns of the first half of the season--thinking the show could go just about anywhere. it was really exciting in a zeitgeisty kind of way, a real pop cultural "event" of the sort that doesn't seem to happen all that often anymore.

yeah i can see that.

nb i got hbo-now a couple months ago so i'm grinding thru a bunch of the "event" shit of the past like 15 years. i'll invite you to engage with my critical carnivale takes in due course.

https://thefilmstage.com/news/cary-fukunaga-confirmed-to-direct-stanley-kubricks-unfinished-six-hour-project-napoleon/

not gonna lie, am v into this idea

it'll definitely look nice. probably best to avoid someone more explicitly invested in a "kubrickian" style (like, maybe, latter day PTA).

fukunaga's jane eyre is ridic beautiful

i would love to see what he could do with a huge battlefield full of smoke and blood & cannons & horses

yeah i hope they throw a lot of money at this.

the hack portentous cack this guy does is not even fit to mentioned in the same sentence as Kubrick.

Sorry but I really hate him.

best not to think of it as a kubrick movie even in the way that AI is, but as a lavish HBO historical miniseries with a talented (imo) stylist at the helm. could be good!

not that the publicity wont be "kubrick kubrick kubrick" for 3 months leading up to it.

Michelle Monaghan is so much better in The Path (show about a cult, exclusively on Hulu) than she was in this. She plays a true believer mom, and she's terrifying.

The Path is v bad and silly tho

i rescreened s1e5 the projects robbery scene is still so fucking tight, also lol @ the 90s rave cohle goes to and someone gets wheeled by him in a wheelbarrow

sry rave that rust goes to not cohle

After being off-the-air for two years — and following and plenty of speculation about its future — HBO’s True Detective is making some progress behind the scenes toward a new season.

EW has exclusively learned that creator Nic Pizzolatto has penned at least the first two episodes for a potential third edition of the acclaimed anthology crime drama.

We have also learned that Emmy-winning writer-producer David Milch — the mind behind dramas such as Deadwood and NYPD Blue — is coming on board to work with Pizzolatto.

The extent of Pizzolatto and Milch’s collaboration is still early days and not yet formalized. Obviously, Milch’s experience as a writer will be a key component, but for the record he’s not expected to serve as the True Detective showrunner (at this stage, there is no specified season 3 showrunner). Also keep in mind a third season has also not yet been greenlit, so new episodes are far from certain.

http://ew.com/tv/2017/03/27/true-detective-season-3-david-milch/

Went to buy 3 at the bootleg place on the weekend; not there yet, so I rewatched 1. I think I liked it even more this time: the one thing that initially wore me down, McConaughey's one-note, relentless nihilism, wasn't a big problem this time. Would I rather he lightened up now and again, made a joke, did some McConaughey-like stuff ("Alright, alright, alright, I think we got our guy...")? Yes, that'd still be my preference. But his character seemed more valid to me, and I mostly felt like I was watching two great actors carrying everything along. I thought the timeline--'95/02/present--was juggled really well. (Emily Nussbaum makes a fair point about the way the main female characters are sometimes just props in service of the story: http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-disappointing-finale-of-true-detective.)

the finale of the third season will be on the 24th of this month

good lord this made me laugh but I still 100% stand by it with the exception that I also include film these days. Actually, I'm a little confused as to why I made the effort to exclude it in the first place.

Anyway, imagine worrying about spoilers? Maybe worry about missing 99% of the point of what you're watching.

Guys, this is TV, not film. The ending doesn't mean shit and I say this as a lifelong fan of tv.

― get up in this twerk cypher (sunny successor), Thursday, May 22, 2014

what are you even talking about

Season 4! Jodie Foster!

Meet your new True Detectives.
The darkness of the Arctic falls heavy upon #NightCountry. The new season of the HBO Original #TrueDetective, starring Jodie Foster and Kali Reis, is coming soon. #NightCountryHBO pic.twitter.com/max4kpK15p

— True Detective (@TrueDetective) February 15, 2023

Rewatched S1 over the last week or so and found it overwhelming. The first time I watched it, I was hung up on the ending; I found the redemptive arc unnecessary or over-coded. This time, I was moved to the point where I had to pause it and pull myself together. Maybe it's age. I even dug the overt 'Jesus' reference in the reflected shot of Rust in the hospital window.

Thinking on the Jesus reference, made me wonder if Rust's seemingly foolish act on tackling Carcosa alone was all part of his 'meditation on the crucifixion' motif that was set running in E02 (I think?): Rust was looking for a way to sacrifice himself.

Here's a weird thing. I've had the final act of episode 5 in my head for years but could never place which series it was from and I certainly didn't remember it as part of TD. It was only halfway through the episode that I was like 'shit, it's the single-take scene!'. I love it as a piece of stand-alone telly but I don't think it fits the whole season at all. I think it's a 'kill your darlings' moment and the season could easily stand without it (with, admittedly, a different solution for finding Ledoux).

Also, one of my favourite things: watching a season that has a long-ass ILX thread to follow along with. SO much better than hot-take Onion/NYT watch along bullshit.

Whenever a thread like this is revived with enthusiasm, I immediately want to rewatch. Which I will, shortly.

i was hoping we had a debut date for season 4 announced...bah

Held up by the strike?

i think it's already finished so I would guess not, but maybe

Recently rewatched The Wolf Of Wall Street and immediately thought of rewatching S1 for more bonkers McConaughey.

Chinaski otm - the two parter thread for Twin Peaks The Return is ILX at its finest.

I read *Galveston* this week and enjoyed it. Like others have said, it is essentially an exercise in cliche but that's part of the point and comfort of noir, right? I really like his sense of place and this is a love letter to Galveston as much as a hardbitten crime story. Galveston (the place) is lit up with the light of memory and sadness.

The book supports the idea that he can't write women (female characters are either sex workers, carers or sentimentalised children), but the existential agony of the central character is well portrayed.

I looked for TD stuff, obviously, but location aside, and a pointed bit where the central character cuts figures out of Lone Star cans, there isn't much there beyond a generalised ambient savagery.

Rewatched S1 for at least the second time (I post about it just above in 2019). I won't open the whole massive thread to see what I wrote the first time, but I think I have the same very minor quibble: that they do such a great job leading up to the final episode, it's slightly anticlimactic when Errol Childress and his half-sister turn out to be sort of conventional backwoods monsters (or at least their maze-like lair seems familiar). I don't know what I was waiting for, but something that really lived up to the unspeakable horror of the VHS tape. Which they do a great job with--you can just barely see what's going on in dim outline, and the rest is conveyed through the horrified reaction of whoever's watching it. I do love how Errol turns up halfway through the season, and Cole thinks back to that encounter in the final episode.

I need to watch this again.

Isn't it kind of a noir trope that the true Big Bad always slips away while our Hero gets at best a smaller victory, sometimes none at all?

i think you're too easy on the wrap up there clem

its *hugely* disappointing that the gothic horror we've been chasing is a bumfuck on a tractor

one of the hardest nose dives in tv history

I think that was my reaction the first time, I guess the letdown inevitably gets factored in ahead of time when you revisit. There are still things about the story I'm not clear on, like how involved Tuttle was--was he just part of the cover-up or was he a participant?--that I'm sure could be cleared up easily with a little online reading.

My expectations for s4 are so unreasonable, if it isn't good I'm gonna plotz

I’m going to give it a chance but only I cause already pay for this dumb azz platform

John Hawkes is turning into a Sean Penn/Dwight Yoakam hybrid creature.

i’m in i dont care how it turns out
its jodi its weird its cold
i’m down

Naming the research station after a Ligotti story is a good omen. The first episode was great.

Yeah, first episode was very strong. A copy of The Thing clearly on display in the research station is a good sign. They're setting up a lot of Native myth-meets-cosmic horror stuff that I hope pays off well.

Gene Wolfe's "Urth Of The New Sun" visible on bookshelf also.

Ahh I've been reading (actually Audible-ing) Gene Wolfe very slowly for the past couple years. Wouldn't have guessed that for a reference point!

xps Tsalal appears to be the title of a Ligotti story, but also (pace Google) an Antarctic location that figures in Poe's Narrative of Sir Arthur Gordon Pym, as well as various continuations/sequels by Jules Verne and others

Wondered for a while what John Hawkes has been up to. Good to see him in this.

Hope there'll be a flashback where the one station employee is explaining Wilco and Cormac McCarthy to the other biologists.

Lol but I thought Wilco bro and Blood Meridian bro were two different guys!

Ope, you're right! If only the music playing on repeat was Andrew Bird whistling instead of "Twist and Shout"...

i like that its research station AND town (plus mine) … adds a lot of potential texture to story & characters, already feel some of that in this first ep

foster’s danvers has a great “over-it-clarice-starling” without specifically being played that way, if that makes sense

and i love the actress playing navarro already - her whole scene with the spongebob toothbrush was a good and very drfinitive signpost ie “there’s a new writing/directing sherriff in town”

Yes the setting is very interesting to me. The swampy Gulf Coast setting of season 1 (still the only season I've watched) felt massive and yawningly empty, but this show feels different. Ennis is established from the beginning as a place of entanglements and collisions, where people jeer at drunk drivers from the open windows of their homes. But then the research station, which you would expect to be the most claustrophobic bottle-episode kind of place, instead has this weirdly liminal quality, like the airlock of a spaceship: a place you only visit en route to (or returning from) the void.

Season 2 is still fascinating to me for its potential, and the setting was a big part of it: taking major strands of California (cults, agriculture, land rights) and setting it mostly in Ventura County. Needed a single director for the whole thing and/or a few more drafts, but as ep 1 of this new season came to an end I realized it ended the same way s2e1 did (though s2e1 ends with Nick Cave covering Alabama's "All The Gold In California" and this one starts and ends with Billie Eilish).

Season 2 is underrated. The annoying aspects (that goddamn nightclub singer, Colin Farrell's useless kid) are actually fairly easy to dismiss, and the Vince Vaughn/Kelly Reilly relationship is actually really well drawn. I've watched it several times.

Still haven't watched Season 3.

S3 is good! But also steers aways from
anything much in the way of cosmic horror, so it feels more like its own thing. Dorff & Ali are great.