TRUE DETECTIVE on hbo - Season Two

to anfor

I hated this with so much vigour the first time round I know there is little point giving it another shot

Look fizzles there are people that arent sure what to make of many of the artistic choices made in herzogs bad lieutenant, imo this isnt quite that beast but id personally judge it in the round as quite separate to a lot of the stuff one would usually say was important to a tv show, because certainly the script absolutely lumbers and certainly some of the actors are more interesting than strictly speaking capable but i was nonetheless compelled

i liked it much better the second time around, perhaps bc i didn't watch it right on the heels of TD1.

it's possible my opinion is not to be trusted tho, as i like Vince Vaughn in this and am kind of annoyed with Farrell.

i'm curious exactly what i'd be "wrong" about if i rewatched??

i really want something that does for LA what much of the first series did for louisiana mystical landscape

I'm one of the naysayers, but if you are interested in the look of S2, here's something I posted way upthread that's still up. A lot of stills.

https://www.polygon.com/2015/8/24/9155667/true-detective-season-2-explain-details-characters-plot-help-episode-7-8-recap-overview

Well, next month I'm going to convince you all to watch Paul Haggis' "Crash"

Good luck with that. * insert wall of barf emojis *

fuuuuuuck that

No one will ever convince me to re watch “Crash” (unless serious cash is involved)

AND EVEN THEN

of all things, crash? i regret convincing you to watch this

Sorry Brad I did extremely hate it

One upshot was that I learned about Vernon, CA! I thought Vinci was a far-fetched concept until I read up about Vernon

oh damn vinci is based on vernon? that makes sense

my memory of the inferior Crash is that i got to the part where the white cop sexually assaulted the black woman they pulled over and I turned it off. i heard the white cop ends up being the hero, yes?

bringing up crash in proximity to this season of television is irresponsible

no way is there a line in crash as good as "everything is fucking," ffs

I thought we were referencing that other crash movie tbh

i could definitely rewatch cronencrash

i still haven't seen the cronenberg crash, i assume i would love it tho

from here on out i am referring to the bad crash as "paul greencrash"

i first saw cronencrash in college amongst an audience of holly hunter obsessed would-be-degenerates who, based on the marketing, somehow thought it would be porn adjacent. we all walked away very confused.

"paul greencrash"

I love that

Oddly enough what upset me the most was the incomprehensibility of the plotting, I was already angry about the Ledo-methlab weirdness, the "the secret to solving this case is in finding that random sex worker" weirdness... then, it was a "oh surely these random illegitimate children are the culprits and they have the hard drive" moment made me punch the couch angrily in a way I haven't since James Hurley spent three episodes in a soap opera

My defining Cronenmoment was being invited by my roommates at age 18 to go see a screening of "Dead Ringers", I had randomly seen "M Butterfly" but that's all I knew about this director, and that Genevieve Bujold was Janeway Mk. 1

We all walked out of the movie in a state of bewildered shock and despite being general non-drinkers we all agreed we needed beers right away and did so

A week later I was looking at TV Guide and I saw that "Dead Ringers" was scheduled. The entry read like "Dead Ringers (Cronenburg, 1990), horror" and I shouted to my roommate "hey Ian I figured out that movie, it was a horror film" and Ian yelled back "ohhhhhhhhhhh now I get it"

*just googled it, 1988 not 1990

james hurley and everyone else spent a lot longer than that in a soap opera tbf

forgot about the random illegitimate children lol. i mean i forgot all the plot, just faces and rooms and rick springfield’s tie/shirt-buttons situation

"alien gynecological tools" is the phrase i'll always associate with dead ringers

Sorry if I got it twisted, I thought we were talking about non-Cronenberg Crash

I have not seen Cronenberg Crash

the mystery does not matter and in fact it's good that it ends in anticlimax

like, the mystery doesn't matter in twin peaks either btw

this “something else”— the wrong interpretation of the clues— is what we call the world

for me literally all of the enjoyment is in the atmosphere, the photography, and the performances. the incomprehensibility of the plotting actually makes the show vibrate with extra surreal energy, even though it evaporates from the mind with every progression... again, feature, not flaw

oh wait i also love all of the nonsense in the dialogue, as i stated above

I kinda feel like true detective s2 walked so Too Old to Die Young could fuck

"you have one of the largest auras i've ever seen. it's taking up this whole room"

This is why Brad is one of the best posters; his enthusiasm is very contagious even when I fucking hate him for using it for evil.

my pronouns are they/them btw (no need to apologize)

and i am not using my powers for evil, everyone here is capable of not watching the thing they think is bad, and i walk a lonely road

I watched it because you thought it was good! and to your credit I'm glad I did if only because I think it finally cured me of my Colin Farrell allergy and I might be able to finish The New World at last

then it served its purpose

ok seen first two episodes, and i'm sort of enjoying it. the morass of psychosexual collapse as a foundation for everything that's going on is quite palpable, which is good. the sense of people being on the edge works. aerial shots of freeways and intersections are unfortunately not enough to connect place to that morass, which is a shame. vince vaughan is a totally empty vessel, a complete void of acting and presence, but that in itself is sort of ok for who he is. there's an internal and meta sense of 'what the fuck are we participating in'. skating badly around in a messy, degraded chandler landscape of cheap casinos.

could it be very much better - yes by god, but yes actually quite enjoying it. i wonder if it was partly fucked over by being a follow up to true detective. it's a different sort of animal.

and they have a *lot* of fun with interior decoration. the bel air mayor's pad is great.

This revive is reminding me that I really wish Too Old To Die Young was available on DVD, because I want to see it and will never get Amazon Prime

Thats the stuff fizzles take it as it is and theres a hollow dread to it, and tbh vaughn delivers as it goes on

Interested what you think the farther you get into it. My first post in this thread, after a couple of episodes, was positive too. By the end, I was exhausted.

The acting was really good imo. Some of those monologues were super-clunky but they (esp Semyon and his girlfriend) sold it well

The monologues were almost showily awful, like it cannot have been purely incompetence imo

aerial shots of freeways and intersections are unfortunately not enough to connect place to that morass, which is a shame

I felt the opposite, in its attempt at being a Great California Novel. It felt like so many strands of California fit into the story, from agriculture to casinos to cults to the landscapes. I wish the Guerneville/Bohemian Grove sections either had a greater sense of place/location or were moved to somewhere plausible in SoCal.