TRUE DETECTIVE on hbo - Season Two

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

yez - "nevermind"

yeah also lenny played the guy whose eyes got pecked out

Final shots plus credit music - Nick Cave covering the Gatlin Brothers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiQ3dh5KS8U

feeling all that schlump but what is justin longness???

what did rust call his board of connections, "the sprawl"? (so great btw) I guess I'm interested in what sense that theme will or will not be repeated here. so far everything seems quite...containable.

i only read the one person's recaps

loved that end shot

http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/kingmakers-true-detective-and-the-hbo-brand/

You barely have to scratch the surface to see the show’s focus on choice, pipelines, and televisual technology. This show came out right after HBO Go and right before HBO Now, the first step toward streaming on-demand delivery of HBO shows. True Detective season one is of and about the first moments of a landscape that will test HBO’s brand as it has never been tested.

Call to mind the show’s imagery: The river, and the way that the crimes are bundled around that pipeline. Remember all those long loving shots of telephone wires? All the lush visuals that immersed us in communities lacking in basic technology? Those shots asked the audience: How will they ever get cable?

nice!

feeling all that schlump but what is justin longness???

― ryan, Monday, June 22, 2015 9:54 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

so i guess if it wasn't totally clear the term "justin longness" (Sarris, A., "The American Cinema", p.216, New York, 1968) traditionally encompasses both the misidentified true detective director Justin Lim (b. 1971) as well as Why Not the writer of True Detective "Nic Pizzolatto", & has generally been discharged sardonically in line with cynical & hot takes on these figures contending that artistry is absent from their practice, suggesting further that the identification of artistry within their works is a confused reader response, overactively & In Fact Even Frothily occurring in the lacunae left between their rudderless practically Burroughsian cut-&-glue deployment of surface-level-attractive stylism & posturing.

haha yes ok (I google Justin Long and was pretty flummoxed as you might imagine)

no it's cool man guess i'm just more familiar w the literature than u

hahaha

willing to concede TD is mere pastiche but I suppose we should let this season play out a bit...

idk i'm pretty hyped. so much time was spent just assembling the kinda dysfunctional bureaucratic Avenger foursome who ended up staring at one another, so i guess the rest of the series is them butting heads, which sounds great: a tangled & strung out la cop show is the best case scenario. pretty sure i was rolling my eyes at the blair witch shit in the first season & it was redeemed by its diversion & character weight. p into taylor kitsch's cop's arc.

it's high level pastiche pulp there is nothing wrong with that, I appreciate that this season owns its pulp more than the last

(xp)

"confused reader response" kinda hits me right between the eyes because during the first season I turned to my girlfriend and said "I feel like this show is reading my mind" because every turn it took is the turn I wanted it to take. "oh wait is he really gonna do a 5 min monologue about the meaningless of life over malickian montage oh yes." so I'm sorta incapable of being objective about it. I will say the aesthetic merits of season one are very much a live question still and I think a lot of that still hangs over this season, fairly or unfairly.

aesthetic as in like swoopy sky shots & burned out shed porn or aesthetic as in like rhetorical & content ??

like, is it dumb and bad or good and smart.

it is mostly good and often smart and sometimes dumb and in a few instances/and aspects objectively bad.

ha ha, right. for sure. for the past few years i've felt myself getting more out of performances than i used to, watching films, this other radiating source, & i feel like they were such a memorable, kinda transcendent part of the first season of this, so much so that dumb & bad was off the grid sorta.

truly!

well there's no charm in any of the performances so i guess i'll just hang on to the luridness, which i do enjoy

HEY
PLUS
the schmoozy business people in this & the scenes of their frosty heavily accented exchanges
were bad

also the yoga guy, maybe

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-iCXxTIM2k7c/UfkM5qJhptI/AAAAAAAAEho/57qJgJz5gWM/s1600/ian.jpg

i hadn't really thought about those scenes but they don't seem to have a relationship to the real world

true detective 2 rescue jon hamm

this show detects dark truths

ha xp

Positive: Music. Like the L Cohen though don't think I'll sit thru it every week. Like the T-Bone stuff, especially the painfully 70s serious cop drama stuff playing with the long overhead looks at the impossibly complex cloverleaf stuff. Pretty open minded so far about the looks, acting, characters, etc. No big probs to me.
Negative: There's no way the CHP guy survives that swerve into the gravel goin' 100 at the end there. And the pullback shot of their little area at the very end, however cool, drives that home. And that song in the bar--"This is my least favorite life." This is my least favorite SONG should be the real lyrics amirite?!

he slowed down before he swerved

xp I like the song...

should prob be performed by sharon van etten rather than a B-level sharon though

bar song written and recorded for the show http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2015/06/21/lera-lynn-on-making-music-for-the-true-detective-season-premiere

i liked when mcadams threw her plastic up at the casino bouncers

One ep in but this seems both dumb AND stupid which is a bummer

lol 'justin longness'

dunno about this

can’t decide if it’s interestingly stylized/ alienating piece of work or amusingly flawed (& what’s the diff)

all the actors might just as well be wearing tragic masks

that lynch-esque industrial hum/ wind-like sound (& thumps), accentuating dread/ uncanny, ran through virtually every scene, so it started to seem funny instead (yet toward end there were effective moments of dread/uncanny)

something entertainingly ridiculous about those ostentatiously damaged lost souls (thinking baout things) “assembling [into] kinda dysfunctional bureaucratic Avenger foursome”

wonder what sex thing antigone was into (‘sometimes’) that spooked guy
yes, plan to call her antigone
lol antigone & athena with father issues

is there new topographics influence in the cinematography?

one thing that worked in the first season that doesn't seem like it's going to happen here is that marty to act as a straight man of sorts for the weirder, more damaged rust. not sure who's going to fill a role like that here since none of these cops seem well-adjusted enough to be an audience stand-in.

also, i don't know what actor could save some of the lines vince vaughan had to deliver but it's not vince vaughan.

anal stuff seemed properly thematic xp