TRUE DETECTIVE on hbo - Season Two

I don't think this is a great season, obviously less fun than Rust and Marty, but I'm in because I am a sucker for California noir and I love byzantine plots that turn on wonky land deals. Any show where "I had to get the financial documents for the tax incentives" is a plot point is one I can get with.

Didn't realize until this morning that the singer in the bar was not supposed to be Elvis, but Conway Twitty (who actually did record "The Rose").

"Is he ok? What happened?"
"Somebody murdered him."

― ryan, Monday, July 6, 2015 11:47 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah this was wonderful! ^

it was kinda interesting watching vaughan at least slightly physicalised in this. just even taking off his jacket. the problem with his performance is he doesn't breathe. & the physicality should be everything. you need access to him as a mammal, oily mammal vaughan, like tony soprano, hairy arms, some kind of unavoidable evidence of just excessive masculinity, that he's in some sense overwhelming & untidy. but he's just glowering & perfectly presented & shaven in every scene, & the costume & the performance & the lighting & the ominous guitar noise rumbling in the background all cohesively support this.

the direction of this is still so frustrating, just in how limited the whole thing is on account of its shortfalls. so many short scenes - not just highway cutaways, but montages of kitsch visiting sex workers, every brief procedural moment, every functional expository exchange - are made useless by how dry & leaden they are, nobody given a prompt to bring any wideness or life to this kinda suffocating world. the editing suite shares space with stars of the lid's practice room & the whole thing is drizzled in narrow foreboding. i kinda enjoyed this - like very literally enjoyed, like i'm inside it enjoying watching them materialise in different locations, am enjoying watching time pass, am still curious about mcadams direction & about the potential for tangled pressure created by warring police depts - but it's so-little-less than the sum of its parts, & could be so much richer.

i hope there are ten seasons just ploughing through variations of cops/setting/directors/emphases, it's a pretty infinitely rich model

they shd try to make it better tho

Let's not get ahead of ourselves

shd do a season directed by david lynch written by david mamet starring some cool actors named david

duchovny and arguette

each one has a dark past

but srsly fuck this show, I'm out

duchovny and arguette

― Οὖτις, Monday, July 6, 2015 1:00 PM (26 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://i.imgur.com/X1JNgb3.jpg

ha ha

idg why they keep putting vaughn in these ridiculous situations. like i couldn't not laugh at that final scene of him in close-up, anxiously brooding, ignoring his wife's questions. i mean it's be tough for anybody to pull that off, let alone vince vaughn.

moral of the story as always: diversify yr portfolio

rly thought he was just going to say 'no ... i'm too damaged' when his wife asked if he wanted to talk

their relationship gets a lot of screentime i wonder where this is going, i feel like somewhere grim

lmao xp

people bring up Mulholland Drive when they talk about this show's Lynchian themes (I, er, still haven't seen Twin Peaks so I can't think of similarities to that) but there's more lifted from Blue Velvet than I realized:

Frank, Ray and Paul all character names from BV

Ani wanting her boyfried to beat her has precedent

http://i.imgur.com/Wl83wiK.png?1

and http://i.imgur.com/p9N8wLD.png?1

The lounge singer, and BV's "The Slow Club," is obvious.

But the discovery of the maimed man that starts the plot, and then the single ear from B.V. (and the body that belonged to)

TD's Paul and BV's Frank, breaking 100mph at night to go out "into the country," in Frank's words.

http://i.imgur.com/7mIWXLf.png?1

http://i.imgur.com/BJRqTdI.png?1

Paul's face when he's riding the bike going 100mph not unlike the strange thrill, and face, Frank makes when he's getting his nitrous oxide (Frank is supposed to be a repressed homosexual, too, according to a review I just of the movie [but I don't remember anything about Frank being gay and closeted in the film itself -- if anyone remembers anything please point that out])

I'm just really glad Vaughn wasn't suddenly able/eager to perform sexually with his wife once he got home from beating up that dude.

ha yeah thought the same, show finally dodged a single cliche

david spade
david lee roth

dave foley
david letterman

http://s3.birthmoviesdeath.com/images/made/rust_garage_1200_570_81_s.jpg

motherfucker w dark secrets
http://www.ifc.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/dave_foley_cast_mini_gallery_thumb_03.jpg

a little blood and wilson fisk could see that in the mirror

lounge singer -- david johansen
mysterious g-man/possible space alien -- david bowie
shadowy political operative -- david axelrod
meth-head biker -- dave navarro
Detective John Kelly -- david caruso

wld screen

internet media entrepreneur-- david thewlis

"Somebody murdered him."

echoing appreciation for that line

“like a cheerleader on an oil rig”-- not subtle, but even fair-to-middling hard-boiled one-liners welcome at this point

“this angsty cop drama you’re rolling” :) for obv reasons

schwimmer and spade, obv

they could name the show 'true david'

these are the daves
who don't know their selves

lol

they have their father's hands
but they come from different moms

these are the daves
who don't know their selves

― drash, Monday, July 6, 2015 6:44 PM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

B-)

I think I've pinpointed vaughn's problem as being that he reads his lines too fast, like a kid forced to read out loud in class. He needs to approach it with a weary slowness!

― ryan, Monday, July 6, 2015 10:55 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark

yeah my diagnosis after the first ep was that he doens't sit on his syllables like he's supposed to

i had a momentary vision of mccounaghey playing vaughn's character and it all clicked, pizzalato can't let go

vince is only good at playing fast talking con men which is why he's good when he's doing gangster stuff and he's bad when he tries to be introspective

didn't he say something about a cosmic echo??

idk it would be cooler if vaughn played the CI who's just like at peace with life and cut out all the brooding shit

also i had forgotten that colin farrell bought his failson a gundam model to try and bond with him in ep 2 i ws reminded when he said he liked to do models with his son this ep

hey cunga rly good posts

-i'm psyched for gay taylor kitsch
-the car getting torched right around the corner from the detectives is a cool idea, a better director would have made it stand out
-starting to seem likely that nic p couldn't come up with enough plot for 8 episodes, the investigation is really lurching along pathetically while we get bad dumb scenes of ray and his dad or ani and her ex
-i think you guys are right about vaughan's line readings, but i don't think there's an actor on earth that could have bailed out the exchange where they both have to say "apoplectic"

shouldn't a basic tenet of writing a short mystery series like this be that the main plot needs to move along significantly at least once per episode? did we learn anything new that might tell us who killed the guy?

when i watch this season i feel like i can visualize the printed screenplay as i'm watching it

like nic pizzalato hunched furiously over a mechanical typewriter typing furiously imagining he is delivering scorching line after scorching line, it all hangs so beautifully in his head, and then vince vaughn goes and gets cast

xxp I kinda liked the "apoplectic" moment it was absurd but in a good way imo

when i watch this season i feel like i can visualize the printed screenplay as i'm watching it

― 龜, Monday, July 6, 2015 10:50 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, it's just appallingly writery

thanks! xpost

I think we all agree that Vince Vaughn is only in his element on TD when he's playing playing with comic and wise-guy scenes and lines.

Years ago, I left a "Dodgeball" DVD running in the family living room, and my mom, who had never seen VV in anything, pointed out how insecure he was as an actor. In the bloopers he's gearing up for an intense scene (the final dodgeball game, prob) by saying "Screw you" to Ben Stiller, to get himself psyched. Mom pointed out that he needed to work himself up as an actor, and there was something amateurish and insecure in going about it that way.

In the scenes from this that require heavy lifting from him as an actor (the recycled Rust Cohle monologues) you can sense he's afraid and a bit nervous, but the show takes advantage of that, and even in casting him knew what it was doing, because when Vaughn needs to look paranoid and on the brink he's quite good. As an over-the-hill conman who got by on charisma but probably can't anymore, he was typecast and it can work.

i think there's something to that, but nic couldn't commit to writing him as 100% conman so he has all these scenes where he needs to project gravitas and it's just so bad.

having him kick that big dude's ass was actually kind of useful, we need to know a little bit about why this guy should hold any weight at all.

You'll notice that Vince Vaughn came on the scene when Robert Downey Jr. wasn't around to be in stuff, and that the RDJ revival has coincided with Vaughn looking a bit lost in Hollywood. I think RDJ could've handled the monologues and some of the darkness that Vaughn struggles to do here, but then Downey is about half a foot shorter than VV and could've looked ridiculous in some scenes as a tough mob boss.

xpost, yeah, the fight scene gave vaughn a good excuse to exist in the show and as the casting choice.

The Confidence-Man who's losing confidence.

Now I wonder if VV was hurt when Jon Favreau made those Iron Man movies with RDJ. If Favreau's time with VV was handy in writing and directing the over-confident, Malibu playboy character.

Robert Downey Jr as a hard-drinking True Detective would be so dark it would make Rust Cohle look like one-half of the Dukes of Hazzard.