TRUE DETECTIVE on hbo - Season Two

grantland gave a pretty positive review, prefaced with some dislike of the first season.

in any case I think I know what to expect, and my tolerance for that sort of thing is really high so I'll probably like it.

i think i only want to see the scene with the fukunaga doppelganger and no other scene

this being bad would not make me dislike this

still feel like a lot of critics fundamentally misunderstand what made the first season great (none of the things that would slot it into typical prestige television for one) but I need to shut up about it.

I am super excited to watch this show crash and burn, don't like that nick pizza fella one bit

interesting point from a mixed review of the new season

I'm not a person who ever had much of a problem with True Detective's self-seriousness; I'd take it any day over the winking camp of a Ryan Murphy show. There is a sincerity to Pizzolatto's writing that is admirable even when it's kind of dumb. And when the first hint of real Carcosa-esque weirdness does eventually rear its head, I sat up immediately. That wouldn't work on a show that wasn't as committed to its cause, no matter how humorless and nihilistic.

http://www.theverge.com/2015/6/19/8813001/true-detective-season-two-review-nic-pizzolatto-hbo

Sad cops sad cops
Whatchagonna do

farrell is on 100 thousand trillion

its totally cop goth

which one is the true detective, it is farrell right?

don't just go by the mustache sterl you know mustaches are tricky

is there a mustache ceremony when they pick the true detective

No spoilers please sheesh

spoiler alert
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mustache

Got into this, and wasn't a fan of season one. Pretty low on the pretentious scale. Didn't feel like philosophy/artiness/etc pushed into the story; felt organic.

Best line was Vince Vaughn's "You're supposed to savor that stuff" or words to that effect.

Twitter points out that all of the women are introduced in their underwear. But hey, that's the genre.

underwear detective

bikini inspector

need a ryan co-sign before i commit myself

Twitter points out that all of the women are introduced in their underwear.

Kelly Reilly is first seen wearing a full-length robe. And her character is quite obviously Vince Vaughn's equal partner.

I liked it. It's a cop show - not as good as some, but better than most. I'm in for at least one more episode, maybe two. Then I have to decide whether to renew my HBO Now subscription for another month.

Yeah--can't you see she's wearing a ROBE?

this was ok, but im having a little trouble with Vaughn. It's fine for a first episode, but I can see where some of the negative reviews are coming from if the next two are similar. Really liked the last third, where exposition gave way to dread.

Did I mishear or did the Taylor Kitsch character mention he worked for a Blackwater-esque company? And then said "we worked for America" or some such.

Army was the ref i thought

thanks ryan i'll watch it then

I need to watch the scene again (not with the girlfriend but when he's getting put on leave) but I googled it and he mentions something called "black mountain." I'm sure that'll come up again.

there is kind of a weird tension between the beautiful, bressonian-model quality of vaughan's face in repose - set & observed as an inscrutable, ruined object - & then the vaughan who has to do stuff, who's stiff & doesn't seem to be threshing internally the way it would probably be good if he was. i thought the direction in this was like a noticeable step down - the overhead shots frequent & un-fluid - & it routinely clipped moments that could have been good to sit with for a moment, like vaughan smashing a glass, &c.

i'm p into mcadams & kitsch. last shot was super ridiculous but the first thing that had any kinda dynamic to it. 龜 c'mmon what did you think.
xp oo

yeah that's true about Vaughn! those shots of his face in the bar were beautiful.

do you mean the last shot of them looking at each other or the aerial shot of the coastline lit up by the police lights. both were awesome imo.

the motorcycle scene was really cool

i thought the direction in this was like a noticeable step down - the overhead shots frequent & un-fluid - & it routinely clipped moments that could have been good to sit with for a moment, like vaughan smashing a glass, &c.

i'm p into mcadams & kitsch. last shot was super ridiculous but the first thing that had any kinda dynamic to it.

otm

yeah i mean the shot of the eye-contact shoot-out between the four of them. but it's good. if there's just convoluted eye contact subtext from now on i will be pleased

probably projecting but I read "who's this fucking loser" in each of their faces, which made me laugh.

lol @ fear of projection in this scenario but yeah totally. definitely more interested in just aggro shoe-squeezing exchanges between esoteric branches of local law enforcement than general self-destructive moustache-wave behaviour.

there is a kenneth lonergan flick coming out sometime which was originally going to have matt damon in, & then got downgraded to starring casey affleck, & i feel like it's going to be hard to watch knowing this - watching matt damon be vulnerable's always so good, & earned, & credible, like it's buried, elicited unwillingly, but with casey affleck it's kinda just right there, like his voice, &c. & colin farrell as livewire is closer to just masculine movie cliche than mcconaughey livewire, i think. like it'll be better if in a couple episodes he's just tangled up in stuff that isn't all ego.

Vaughn does manage to put across a kind of exaggerated wounded compassion (esp toward Ray) a few times--though it's hard to tell at this point how were supposed to take it.

like, in a lot of ways he seems the most vulnerable of the characters, or at least the least emotionally armored.

thanks ryan i'll watch it then

ha I missed this. yes you have my blessing. (please note I have no confidence in my own taste)

if there's one thing i can't be objective about its self-serious philosophical genre exercises.

So am I the only one who was screaming for Farrell to stand up from the booth and smash that girl's guitar against the wall, John Belushi style?

maybe a reach but sorta twin peaks "it is happening again" vibe to that scene that i really dug.

so many close-ups.

based on a single ep, the biggest difference between Season 2 and Season 1 is Season 2 feels like a TV show.

i thought the direction in this was like a noticeable step down - the overhead shots frequent & un-fluid

Happen to be writing this from Ventura County, but I like how the overhead shots connect the geography of the area - the overpasses in the Valley vs. the ones further north and so on.

based on a single ep, the biggest difference between Season 2 and Season 1 is Season 2 feels like a TV show.

― resulting post (rogermexico.), Monday, June 22, 2015 12:57 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what did season 1 feel like

pretty disappointed molly lambert isn't doing recaps for Grantland (she was the only one i would read last season) but i enjoyed the new guy's take on Farrell.

Rust Cohle was supposed to be cool — like an amalgamation of John Wayne, Dean Martin, and Ricky Nelson from Rio Bravo — morally certain, drunkenly charming, and very, very pretty. Farrell is none of these things. He is not cool. When he talks, it’s with a pinched, nasal voice that’s uncomfortable with being heard. He repeats lessons on fatherhood that he’s read in a book. As for his look, I can’t claim to be totally up on the fashion trends of industrial Los Angeles law enforcement, but with his bolo tie, Magnum, P.I. mustache, and ’90s Christian Slater hair, he looks like the monster created by someone who has spent too many late nights watching too many cop shows and Westerns.

http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/the-homer-inline2.jpg

GTA V: the TV show

Happen to be writing this from Ventura County, but I like how the overhead shots connect the geography of the area - the overpasses in the Valley vs. the ones further north and so on.

interesting to read this; fwiw i guess i'm thinking more of the architectural shots than the highways, where we'd get this kind of fragmented four-shot interlude just showing Some Industrial Sites/commercial zones as establishment or dressing, but in this kinda arrhythmic way, without a lot of grace. i can't remember thinking this about the highways. i liked the shot of the guy riding the bike, silhouetted against its light.

>I can’t claim to be totally up on the fashion trends of industrial Los Angeles law enforcement, but with his bolo tie, Magnum, P.I. mustache, and ’90s Christian Slater hair, he looks like the monster created by someone who has spent too many late nights watching too many cop shows and Westerns.

i am certain this is what they were going for. just total, foot to the floor, cliche cop.

one of the interesting things about the first season is how it took that quality of some noir in which it's sometimes hard to tell which plot elements have direct bearing on the mystery in question and which are simply part of, let's say, the atmosphere or environment and made it in many respect the explicit focus of the show, making the (ethical?) question of disentangling the specific perpetrator from the "context" (here quite literally cosmic) of the crime something that Rust, at least, has to grapple with. (not for nothing is he distracted by a literal vision of the cosmos right before getting shivved by the murderer.)

here im curious if a similar gesture of narrowing in after widening out (pretty typical of some noir, i'd say) will take hold, given that NP has already stated he's pared away most of the occult vibes. those shots of winding freeways seem to suggest something different from season 1's ancient and pervasive evil, maybe something more labyrinthine, some way in which things hang together or are connected in their complexity, as if those shots are dramatizing the plot mechanizations that are brining these lost souls into the same time and place. even the other aerial shots of industrial complexes seem to be full of information connecting to itself.

i only skimmed the write-ups but it's kinda nice knowing that this - like how cliched its concerns might be, how superficial its reliance on the glamour of masculine broodiness is - is all subject to just whatever happens in the other episodes, that it can all accumulate weight in retrospect. & i hope the circling overhead stuff turns out to be charged w/ psychogeographic meaning, BUT the justin longness of everything makes me feel like it's kinda just wheel-spinning, like cycling through satisfying dress-up scenery (vince vaughan in a robe hanging outside his modernist house in the hills, mulholland drive cruising, &c). the ominous ambient music overload while the lawyer's prodding colin farrell about his wife's killer* feels kinda just like autopilot, to me, & the obvious worst case scenario is that it's the sorta noir-y dressing of s1 without the attention to emptying out & reusing tropes that s1 had.

* hey so ps i - ugh - read some thing last night that mentioned that colin farrell ('s character no libel) killed the guy who attacked his wife; i know this was set-up & alluded to but did i miss a part where we learned the guy actually died?

Is the opening credits music leonard cohen