I. The Long Bright Dark
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Jason Shankel January 30 San Francisco California United States
January
II. Seeing Things
III. The Locked Room
There are two narrators, Rust Cohle and Martin Hart, narrating about a case they caught in 1995, the grisly murder of Dora Lange. Ms. Lange’s body was arranged in a tableau with animal parts, bundles of sticks and other Blair Witch type shit. Cohle describes the scene as the work of a “meta-psychotic” and quickly concludes that he will kill again. Hart says he’s jumping to conclusions. This is a cliche in crime stories: the intelligent, socially awkward expert profiler who the police hire and then proceed to completely ignore while he makes fairly obvious observations, like this being clearly not a novice killing. My first reaction was an eye roll, but then on subsequent viewing, I’ve seen how both of these men, narrating from separate rooms years after the fact, are selling cop cliches about the other. To Cohle, Hart is a typical dimwitted incurious bully cop who favors simple answers, and that’s how he comes across in Cohle’s sections of the narrative. Hart even establishes the premise that there are cop cliches (the bully, the man haunted by demons, the brain) and that any of them could be a good cop or an incompetent. Him? He’s just a “regular type guy with a big dick,” another cliche. For his part, Hart characterizes Cohle as a burned out egghead, too smart for his own good, living in an improbably under-furnished apartment, poorly medicating his grief over his dead daughter and lost marriage with alcohol, idly musing about humanity being nature’s mistake, yearning to see our species commit mass suicide and very distinctively non- or even anti-Christian in a community where Christianity is almost as popular as
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football. “After a certain age, a man without a family is not a good thing.” Penetrating the narrative means correlating two unreliable narrations of the same events. It’s interesting that Rust uses the term “meta-psychotic” to describe the perpetrator, when “pattern killer” or “serial killer” would be the more common term. Metapsychosis is not a term for pattern killing. It’s the process of direct communication between two minds without an intervening medium (ie telepathy.) A near homonym of metapsychosis is metempsychosis, which refers to the transition of the soul out of the body after death and into another host, an animal or a human. Both of these words give us a clue to the solution of the final riddle: if they caught the killer in 95, how is it possible for there to be a fresh killing in 2012, complete with details from 95 that were not known to the general public? The obvious answer is that the killer was familiar with the investigation, hence the interrogation of the two men. Unless, of course, the killer has communicated with or transferred his soul to another...either supernaturally or via ordinary communication. There is also a strong religious theme. The “anti-Christian”angle is
scoffed at by both men and its advocate is presented as a glad-handing, politically connected interloper who wants to make this part of a political culture war campaign, presumably targeting the usual suspects (goth kids, metal heads, gay liberals, whatever). And yet we also see uninvestigated animal mutilations at a predominantly black church and make a strong point of Cohle being decidedly NOT Christian himself. When we look at the real history of “Satanic” crimes, including vandalism, animal mutilation and murder, the pathology is consistent. The perpetrators typically have a strong religious background from which they derive their Satanic ideation. The similarities between seemingly disparate crimes lead some to imagine that there are secretive underground groups of Satanists collaborating to commit ritual crime, when in fact it’s just that Satanic symbology is something the general public is familiar with. And so we have another mystery: is the anti-religious symbology part of the killer’s actual motive? Or is he using it as a smokescreen to hide his actual motive?
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Jason Shankel January 30 San Francisco California United States
January
Notes on True Detective: Carcosa & West Memphis Dora Lange's diary speaks of "The King in Yellow" and "Carcosa." Cohle says it reads like fantasy. "Carcosa" is the name of a fictional city established in Ambrose Bierce's "An Inhabitant of Carcosa." "The King in Yellow" is a collection of short horror stories by Robert Chambers that borrow a number of elements from Bierce's work, including the city of Carcosa. Chambers describes Carcosa using the kind of desolate lyrical poetry used in the show's theme song, The Handsome Family's "Far From Any Road." You can read some excerpts from "The King in Yellow" on Wikipedia. You can almost hear the honky tonk steel guitar in the background of "Cassilda's Song." http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/The_King_in_Yellow Chambers was much admired by HP Lovecraft, who borrowed some of Chambers' names and images in the development of the Cthulhu Mythos, which have in turn been an inspiration for countless writers to follow. The story takes place in 1995, one year after the high profile conviction of the "West Memphis Three," (Damien Echols, Jessie Miskelley and Jason Baldwin.) Almost immediately there was criticism that the boys had been convicted based largely on a coerced confession and their goth/metal/punk images and not on the evidence. "Paradise Lost," an HBO Undercover documentary highly critical of the case against the three aired in 1996. In this milieu, it's not surprising that both Cohle and Hart would both be gun shy about endorsing "occult" theories of the crime they're investigating. It's interesting that Cohle and Hart are being interviewed in 2012, not 2013 or 2014.
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Though not fully exonerated (their ness to accept "leftovers." Pacino convictions stand), the West Memsimilarly rationalizes his disconnectphis Three were released in late 2011, ed angst: "I need it to keep me sharp." just a few months before the Cohle That, of course, is bullshit as is Hart's and Hart are questioned about the rationalization that he needs to drink Dora Lange case. and screw around to blow off steam. Hart's father-in-law talks to Hart Both men are simply the same kind of about "these kids today" with impulse-driven adrenalin junkies their goth makeup and black they accuse others of being, and so hair "crying about their rights." they project that self-loathing onto Hart takes an uncharacteristithose they investigate. Of course, just cally progressive stance that old because you project evil onto somemen have been saying that kind one, doesn't mean they weren't evil to of thing about kids for generabegin with. tions, and then the old men die, And so we have, as Hart would say, the young kids grow up and the our "narrative." Fucked up kids Earth keeps spinning on its axis. with their fucked up hairstyles Hart later rationalizes his adultery playing D&D and listening to and drinking by saying that he the Cure might murder someneeds to unwind before going one just for kicks and carve home "for the good of his Satanic symbols into the body. family," yet we subsequently see We also see Cohle's observation him invoke the job to bully his that this isn't just fucked up wife into dropping her "poor tweaker lunacy, but a strucme whining," which she actualtured story. As with the evoluly wasn't engaging in that we tion from Bierce to Chambers could see. Hart here expresses a to Lovecraft, we see an envelopmore conservative value that ing narrative with the very the home should be a sanctuary strong possibility that the from all the horrors he has to "occult" symbology doesn't deal with on the job and that he represent delusions in the is entitled to her support killer's mind, but rather deluwithout having to offer any of sions the killer knows are his own. already in society's collective Hart's rationalizations and his mind. wife's "poor me whining" are an If you tell me you're scared of the homage to a similar scene in Cookie Monster, I'll leave cookie Heat, where Pacino derisively crumbs at my crime scenes. dismisses his wife's unwillingÂ‑
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Jason Shankel January 30 San Francisco California United States
January
There is an essential contradiction to nihilism: if life truly is the hollow pursuit of meaningless and unattainable goals characterized by perpetual alienation and a dreary desire for escape...then why not embrace religion or any other comforting "delusion?" Delusions are only a bad thing if truth has meaning and life a purpose. In this episode, we see Cohle and Hart confront each other's unearned certainties. Cohle characterizes religious faith as clinging to impossible fairy tales to explain existence and suggests that it would be better to know straight up who would be a piece of shit son-of-a-bitch without the promise of divine reward. Marty suggests that Cohle's anti-religious attitude smacks of desperation, suggesting that Cohle is searching for precisely that kind of narrative comfort. But Cohle's God isn't the God of the Bible, but rather the God of Meaning. All the deaths in the DB, the symbology on the victims, Cohle's obsessive search to connect it all, validate Marty's assessment: Cohle is as invested in his narratives as the congregation in the tent is in theirs. Of course, the strong possibility remains that Dora Lange's killing was arranged precisely to lead Cohle to this conclusion. Someone with access to a backlog of mysterious killings could have arranged this one intentionally to lead investigators right where they've been led.After breaking into Lisa's apartment and assaulting her date, Marty asks Cohle... reluctantly...if he's ever thought of himself as a bad man. Cohle says the world needs bad men to keep the other bad men from the door. The only bad man who's kicked in a door this week is, of course, Marty.
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In the scene where he confesses his midlife insecurities to his wife, we see the kind of master manipulator Marty is. It seems that he's accessing genuine emotions, but he expresses banal and non-specific general midlife anxieties that pretty much everyone has from time to time. We never see any evidence that he's feeling particularly overwhelmed by life or terrified by aging. But he knows his wife will buy that narrative, and so he gins himself up a pity party and she goes for it. And here we learn that Marty has been on a pity-party spiral for more than a year, not just since catching the Dora Lange case. I guess "poor me bullshit" is okay when you're the big he-man provider and not the nagging wife, eh Marty? Marty is destroying his family, detaching from his wife, getting violent with his mistress, spending multiple nights in a row drunk and away from home, all while selling himself as the rod and the staff of family values. As a general rule, anyone who has to say "I'm not a psycho" probably is. What remains to be seen is whether Marty is clever enough to have crafted an elaborate narrative trap for Cohle to fall into. When he offered the "retard explanation" (you stay classy,
Marty) that the minister's assistant paid for sex, felt shame, took it out on Dora and then tried to "redeem the act" by posing her the way he did, Cohle (despite himself) admits that it's a good theory, except the assistant has been castrated. Marty thanks him sarcastically, saying he thought it up all on his own. I wonder.
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Jason Shankel made Sion Isaacs Shankel an admin January 30
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Jason Shankel updated the group tags to True Detective, Mathew McConaughey, Woody Harrelson. January 30
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Jason Shankel updated the description. January 30
This group is dedicated to HBO’s awesome crime series ‘True Detective.’ Come on in and start asking the right f*cking questions!
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I'm planning to rewatch all three episodes, back to back, on Saturday evening. :-) I’ve already rewatched two and three twice each.
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Justin I’Onn January 31 6:39 am
I rarely ever rewatch a show...but I think I am up to four times each e on thus akready... how are the others addicts doing?
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Shayne Bowman January 31 3:25 pm
I feel like i have to watch each episode twice, just to parse all of Cohle’s dialogue.
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No ‘True Detective’ this Sunday. HBO doesn’t want to compete with the Super Bowl, aka the ludicrous pursuit of collective achievement by proxy to a gang of mercenary avatars of senseless aggression and faux machsimo. We’ll be back next week.
Sion Isaacs Shankel January 31 San Francisco California United States
Jason Shankel January 31 San Francisco California United States
Hugs and Kisses, Rust Cohle
January
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FYI: There’s a lot of good True Detective talk on Grantland’s Hollywood Prospectus podcast with Andy Greenwald and Chris Ryan. https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/ grantland-pop-culture/id642537435?mt=2
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Shayne Bowman January 31 3:28 pm
To get it in iTunes or Sitcher, you have to subscribe to the Pop Culture podcast on Grantland, then listen to the episodes marked Hollywood Prospectus. Or you can stream direct off their site: http://grantland.com/ hollywood-prospectus/
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Sion Isaacs Shankel January 31 7:16 pm
Oooo
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Justin I’Onn January 31 7:58 pm
Subscribed now. Will listen later. :-)
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Justin I’Onn January 31 9:00 pm
I think I’m listening to the wrong episode. They’re discussing The Bachelor - a lot. lol
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Shayne Bowman January 31 9:04 pm
That podcast is a combination of 4-5 casts in one feed. So you have to find the episode marked Hollywood Prospectus to get to the True Dectective talk
Shayne Bowman January 31
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Shayne Bowman January 31 9:04 pm
But the Girls with Hoodies had some good True Detective talk in a recent ep
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Justin I’Onn January 31 9:31 pm
I found it now. It’s the podcast dated January 29th. http://pcasts.in/EcYY
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Justin I’Onn February 2
Interview with Matthew McConaughey, in yesterday’s UK Telegraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/ starsandstories/10602734/MatthewMcConaughey-exclusive-interview.html
Having lost 38lb to play Ron Woodroof, an HIV-positive cowboy, in Dallas Buyers Club, the actor formerly known as Hollywood’s Shirtless Lust Object Number One then gave a performance so powerful he is favourite to win the Oscar. How did the man with the gleaming abs achieve such a spectacular career turnaround? Matthew McConaughey is on his knees, begging me to take him back. ‘I am nothing!’ he implores, his hands clasped, rocking back and forth. ‘My life is nothing without you! If you’ll take me back I can be something!’ He is halfway through explaining the DNA of the romcom to me. We’ve already done Boy Meets Girl and Boy Loses Girl. We’ve touched on one peculiarity of the romcoms McConaughey appeared in in the 2000s, which is Boy Strips For Girl – a scenario that tested the ingenuity of screenwriters in film after film (shower scene, surf scene, a change of shirt after a sweaty commute, change of T-shirt after it is splashed by passing truck, job as a submariner). Now we’ve got to Man Chases After Girl, generally by motorbike (How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days) or moped (The Wedding Planner). We’re at the climax. The kisser. Crunch time. ‘The directors in those things always want the man to come crawling back on all fours,’ McConaughey says. ‘“I was nothing”, and so on and so forth… I was always like, what woman wants that guy? I’ve got to find a way to keep the balls on the guy. To walk back in with dignity and stand tall.’ He leaps to his feet with one bound, and starts pacing. ‘I don’t mind going, “I’m sorry I screwed up.” Say you want to give it another shot. I can do that. I can understand that. End it with a little bit of hope. But do we have to wrap it up with the guy completely emasculated going, “Take me back!” and we lived happily ever after and had eight kids. Who wants that guy?’ He upturns his palms to the heavens. Nobody, I murmur, spellbound. But this guy? The one in front of me? The 188lb of glorious, 44-year-old Texan, buff and tanned, who throws his whole body into stories, springing around the room, loosing long, cascading riffs peppered with sun-kissed
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mysticism (‘Keep on livin’), self-development bumper stickers (‘Find your frequency’), and other assorted personal hustle-and-jive? This guy? This guy is on fire. People have been noticing, too. In the past few years McConaughey has been on an acting roll, cutting loose from the megabuck parts for a series of down-and-dirty roles – as a scuzzball defence attorney in The Lincoln Lawyer, a mangy drifter in Mud, a strip-club owner in Magic Mike, a psychopathic assassin for hire in Killer Joe, a booze-fuelled Mephistopheles in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, and now a trash-talking Aids activist in Dallas Buyers Club – that have reminded everyone why they made such a big deal of him in the first place. Having won the best actor Golden Globe for Dallas Buyers Club, McConaughey is now the front runner for the Oscar. It was ‘le comeback de l’année’, France’s TF1 News said, or as GQ termed it, the ‘McConaissance.’ McConaughey celebrates his Golden Globe for Dallas Buyers Club with his wife, Camila Alves. PHOTO: Rex Features ‘The Mer-con-nay-sonce,’ McConaughey says with a grin when I trip over the pronunciation, before slipping into the third person he sometimes uses to dramatise important points in his self-development. ‘I’m surprising people. “Jeez, you’re really emerging, McConaughey. I’m seeing you differently. Things you’re doing are sticking. You’re like wet shit,” as Ali Farka Touré would say. The African blues man. I asked him once, why don’t you play in the US and Europe more? “Because there I would be dried shit. Neither me nor my scent would stick with me,” he told me. “But here I am wet shit. Both me and my scent stick with me.” Evidently I’ve got some wet shit going on.’ The physicality of this image is entirely fitting. McConaughey is a physical actor and a physical talker, and comebacks are a physical business, as Mickey Rourke found out in The Wrestler – ‘this broken-down piece of meat’ the one thing an actor has left after everything has been stripped from him. The star having fallen, his body must be offered up in fresh sacrifice. Playing a strip-club impresario in Magic Mike, McConaughey, dressed in leather chaps, savouring the waves of female lust buffeting the stage like a violin virtuoso, stunningly deconstructed his reputation as Shirtless Lust Object Number One, cinema’s one truly objectified male. But the death blow to that image is delivered this month in Dallas Buyers Club, based on a real story, in which McConaughey plays a part-time rodeo cowboy and hard-partying sex fiend named Ron Woodroof, who, in 1985, was told he had contracted HIV and was given 30 days to live. He subsequently scoured the globe looking for alternative therapies, becoming in the process an unlikely gay-rights crusader as he established a
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‘buyers’ club’ to supply people with HIV and Aids with medications that were not approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). McConaughey lost 38lb to play the emaciated Woodroof, staying out of the sunlight to immerse himself in a trove of diaries and tapes. When he first saw himself on screen, his first thought was, ‘F***ing hell, McConaughey, you look like a reptile!’ ‘He was sending pictures and I thought, wow,’ the film’s French-Canadian director, Jean-Marc Vallée, says. He adds that, on set, McConaughey’s insistence on silence while he got into character could be ‘hard to deal with. “Oh my God, man, relax, chill out.” But I get it. It’s Ron. He’s becoming Ron, even between takes. I’m not going to take it personally, I want to punch him but…’ The film was very much McConaughey’s baby. The script, by Melisa Wallack, was knocking around Hollywood for some 20 years, attracting the attention of first Brad Pitt then Ryan Gosling, and was turned down by studios 86 times before McConaughey’s advocacy secured the $6 million budget, which allowed for 28 days in which to make the film – a shoestring production. McConaughey remained the prime orchestrator; revising the script, suggesting new scenes, giving notes to Vallée in the editing room. ‘He was the one challenging me on set, not just on storytelling and character but directing,’ Vallée says. ‘He can be as cocky as Ron can be, and as charming in order to get what he wants. “Texas is movement,” he kept saying to me. “Texas is movement.” He was moving constantly. ‘That’s what Ron was, that’s what he is, in a way. To see Matthew talk, to see him act, it’s movement. But I must say that behind the acting it was Matthew’s humanity that made the difference. This guy has something in the face, this energy, this way of talking that within 10 minutes has you caring for him. The first audience we screened it for I could feel it, I was in the room, 250 people. I could feel the crowd behind him. The acting is something but the guy, the guy has such visceral humanity.’ Matthew McConaughey’s career is the story of what happens when a natural acting talent – easygoing, pleasure-seeking, frankly incredulous that people are giving him money for this gig – goes to work for a Hollywood machine eager to run him on the fumes of pure charisma. Emblazoned on the cover of Vanity Fair after his appearance in the all-star John Grisham fiesta A Time to Kill in 1996, McConaughey is suddenly ‘the new Paul Newman’, given choice roles in films with Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis and Ron Howard. Except those films are Amistad, Contact and EDtv – a run of bad luck at the box office that is finally reversed in 2001 when he appears opposite Jennifer
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Lopez in The Wedding Planner, a modest hit that is followed by a bigger one, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, opposite Kate Hudson. The two click, and McConaughey’s fate is seemingly as locked as his gleaming abs in a series of films – Failure to Launch, Fool’s Gold, Ghost of Girlfriends Past – the mere thought of which would have Ryan Gosling or Leonardo DiCaprio waking in a cold sweat. But McConaughey seems almost entirely lacking the usual career anxiety, and accompanying skills of realpolitik, that propel such careers. To hear him say it, he has simply been following the sun – going where it’s warm. ‘I said, “Hey, do my good looks help me along? Absolutely. Does the fact that my body is considered good and we’re gonna have me up there in a shirtless scene help it along? Sure.” ‘I didn’t ever go, “No, no, no.” I was like, “Yeah! I get that. That’s fun. What’s the big deal?” If you go deep with the romcom you sink the ship. There’s a buoyancy to the frequency of romcoms. To be light is critically always looked down upon – it’s willowy, it’s wispy, it’s nothing. You know what? It’s f***ing not easy to do and a lot of people don’t do it well. A lot of the work in those things is to stay buoyant. To say, “Hey, get offa my cloud, man! I’m dancing between the raindrops!”’ Like so much of what comes out of McConaughey’s mouth, you really feel that to get the most out of this riff you ought to be hearing it while sitting round a campfire on a Malibu beach, passing round a joint as dawn breaks. McConaughey is his own creature, attuned to his own personal wavelength – sunny but soulful, laidback but busy, busy, busy – somewhere between a film star, a Beat poet and a beach bum. Arrested in 1999, when police knocked on his door to find him playing bongo drums naked, a bong on the table, he spent the night in jail but ended up leading his cellmates in a singalong and later had T-shirts printed that read what part of naked bongo playing don’t you understand? In 2004 he bought himself an Airstream trailer – the first of many – and whenever the fishbowl got too much for him in La La Land he would hit the road, seeking out crummy motels, or else following the trail of his favourite bluesman out to Africa, backpacking up the Niger river, or hauling out to the Sahara to attend a music festival north of Timbuktu. ‘I have to check out so I can listen to myself,’ he says. ‘For the first 10 days it’s hell. Can’t stand my company, have to shake all the demons, all the excesses, the wanting to call a friend – “Aww, I’m alone, I’m so lonely” – and then you stick with it and what happens about day nine, always day nine, a little old thing goes off. “Well, guess what, man, you’re stuck with me. There’s
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nothing you can do so let’s figure out how to get along. Whatever it is I forgive you. Let’s work on this.” No matter who you’re in bed with you’re always sleeping with one person and that’s you.’ There is anger to McConaughey, too. It’s there in the romcoms, which belong at the feistier end of the genre. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days isn’t Hugh Grant hemming and hawing over the lyrics to a Partridge Family song; it’s McConaughey and Hudson vowing to make each other’s life a merry hell. McConaughey was always on the lookout for ‘a place to grow a little bit of a fang and get away with it. There’s normally about one spot in each of those romantic comedies where you can go, “Nobody’s f***ing fooled…”’ The rage is there, too, in his Ron Woodroof, railing against the FDA, and the dying of the light, in Dallas Buyers Club. ‘In each scene what’s the main emotion?’ McConaughey says. ‘Rage. Rage, man. What emotion gets more stuff done than rage? Rage is the one that makes stuff happen.’ McConaughey’s upbringing was loving but a little fierce around the edges, instilling resiliency above all else. The youngest of three boys growing up in Uvalde, Texas, he was a surprise baby, his pipe-supply salesman father, Big Jim, in his 40s when he was born, his brothers already in their teens. His mother, Kay, a kindergarten teacher, had a rule: if it’s daylight, you get outside. Don’t watch TV. Don’t go to the movies. Even if it’s raining, it’s sunny. Is the rain going to hurt you? Get out there. ‘It was a do it, do it, do it lifestyle,’ he says. Every night, they would have dinner together and tell stories. ‘A great family of bullshitters,’ he says. ‘Oh yeah. Great stories that still get rehashed every Christmas when we get together and someone puts a new tweak on ’em, just to make ’em interesting and goad the others. It’s entertainment. That’s how we entertained ourselves and how we still entertain ourselves.’ Some of the stories told in the McConaughey household weren’t so entertaining at the time although he can laugh about them now. His parents were married, divorced, remarried, divorced and married again, without any of the children finding out about it until their father died of a heart attack in 1992; they were told their mother was ‘on vacation’. Was Big Jim trying to protect his kids from the truth? ‘Or they knew that one day they’d get back together and it was a case of “Hey, just don’t bring it up in the interim, and we’ll get back together and if we don’t we’ll have to tell them but for now…”’ he says. ‘Theirs was some fierce love. They were not just flirting. They communicated and loved like this, man’ – he drives a fist into his palm – ‘it was hardcore. Talk about the drama. Talk about passion. Brrrr.’ It reminds me of the streak of misplaced gallantry to Mud, the title
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character in Jeff Nichols’s 2012 film, which Nichols wrote specifically with McConaughey in mind: a sun-kissed drifter on the bayou whose stories are never an inch from bullshit, and whose love for his long-lost honey (Reese Witherspoon) turns out to be his downfall. In his own romantic life, McConaughey has taken some time to settle, dating a string of fellow stars – Sandra Bullock, Ashley Judd and Penélope Cruz – before falling for Camila Alves, a Brazilian model whom he met in an LA bar in 2006. He describes himself as ‘very single’ when they met, ‘meaning I was going about my business,’ he says with a knowing man-to-man intentness to his gaze. It was a year and a half before they were dating exclusively, but ‘all of a sudden I looked up and was like, this is the only woman I’ve wanted to go out with every single night since I met her, and that’s a pretty good sign. You know what I mean?’ Now his wife, Camila has borne him three children – Levi, five, Vida, four, and Livingston, one – and it was from this domestic stability, strangely, that the fruits of his recent resurgence were sown. ‘Being a father is the one thing I always knew I wanted to be,’ he says. ‘Looking around at my own life, I said to myself, “Man, what I’m doing in my own life is more interesting than my work.” I was like, “That’s OK. Better be that way than the other way around. At least you’re getting something out of life. You’re going to work and you’re enjoying it. You’re finding ways to get challenged, McConaughey.” You do the work, it pays the bills, but boy my life was vital. The way I’m loving, the way I’m expressing my anger, either I’m mad as hell or I’m laughing harder at that joke than anyone else does. ‘I was like, OK. Is there a way my career can catch up with the vitality of my own life? So I said, wait for some roles that move my floor. That shake me up a little bit. And make me go — oh, oooh, aaah.’ He wiggles his backside in his chair, as if getting the almightiest back-rub, and maybe a little something else on the side. ‘I don’t know what to do with that… That’s tasty… OK yeah…’ McConaughey has just finished shooting the new Christopher Nolan sci-fi spectacular, Interstellar, about which he is sworn to secrecy, but once the awards season is over has no plans, besides getting on the road again as soon as he can. Isn’t it more difficult with a family in tow? ‘I’ll tell you, I’m very fortunate here,’ he says. ‘When I go to work, the family comes with me. We all just say, this is part of the adventure. When we were on the Mississippi river for Mud, we decided we were all going to stay in the trailer on the Mississippi – a two-month vacation. Talk about Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. No toys, no electricity, this is going to be great, we got to do this now…
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IV. Who Goes There
‘Hey, we’re going to Brazil for 11 days to see Camila’s family – guess what, let’s make a rule: everyone can only take a carry-on backpack. All five of us in one room. Oh jeez, but once we do it it’s going to be fun. You know what? There’ll be more stories to tell.’ Dallas Buyers Club is out on February 7
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Jason Shankel February 6 San Francisco California United States
D minus four days and counting... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JVK0-4HQTY The Monster at the end of this Book, this was my sister's favorite book as a kid... This one and "The Fat Cat"... I was playing around with some new screen capture software and captured this fro... youtube.com
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The snark must flow... http://truedetectiveconversations. tumblr.com/
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That awkward moment...when you wake up early on Sunday and try to go back to sleep, not because you’re tired, but because it will shorten the wait for True Detective.
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You know, cops are supposed to do ridealongs for citizens interested in observing police work. Cohle must have some stories about doing those before he made detective.
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Jason Shankel February 8 San Francisco California United States
Jason Shankel February 9 San Francisco California United States
Jason Shankel February 9 San Francisco California United States
February 25
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Anastasia Lunea February 10 San Francisco California United States
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Jason Shankel February 10 San Francisco California United States
http://rlsbb.fr/true-detectives01e04-hdtv-x264-2hd-2/ True Detective S01E04 HDTV x264-2HD rlsbb.fr Thanks Shayne Bowman for this... http://www. vulture.com/2014/02/seitz-on-true-detectives-6minute-tracking-shot.html?mid=facebook_vulture Seitz on True Detective’s 6-Minute Tracking Shot -- Vulture It’s a mistake to praise the shot simply for existing. Vulture|By Matt Zoller Seitz
The fourth episode of True Detective will forever be known as “the one with the six-minute tracking shot,” and why wouldn’t it be? It is logistically impressive: the sort of thing you notice and appreciate even if you’re a more casual moviegoer who doesn’t normally fixate on composition, shot duration, and other cinematic style choices. It’s of a piece with True Detective’s fiendishly elaborate construction. The entire show is conceived as one gigantic geographically dispersed, time-shifting puzzle, with shots answering other shots that in turn seem to pose questions to shots that haven’t appeared onscreen yet. The overall effect suggests that the past is continually in conversation with the present, a notion that’s made official whenever a past action is commented upon by a present-tense character during those office-bound interview scenes, and we hear the dialogue as voice-over before the show cuts to the speaker’s face. And because every episode of True Detective is written by Nic Pizzolatto and directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga (Jane Eyre, Sin Nombre), it has a stylistic cohesiveness that a lot of series, even great ones, lack. That makes you sit up and take notice whenever it departs from whatever norms it has established. That blowout tracking shot at the end of last night’s episode was so striking not just because it was awesome, but because it was the first such shot in the show’s run. But I think it’s important to put that tracking shot in a larger
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context, and talk about what makes it work dramatically, as opposed to what makes it merely “awesome.” It’s a mistake to praise the shot simply for existing, for a couple of reasons. TV directors, whose work tends to be devalued generally, stage moments just as complex fairly often and critics don’t pat them on the backs for it. In fact, the attention paid to this one instance makes me inclined to devalue the shot just a little bit. It suggests a certain “Look at me, ma!” obviousness deployed in service of getting TV critics who don’t normally pay attention to style to notice it here. It’s a showstopper in the literal sense. While impressive in every department (camera acrobatics, choreography, lighting), that tense climactic sequence took me out of a drama that had otherwise been totally immersive. That’s not entirely a bad thing — I’ll get to why in a moment — but it might prove to be problematic, unless True Detective builds on it in an interesting way in future episodes. Second, this is far from the first elaborate tracking shot that’s been done within the context of a TV drama. In fact, E.R. and other John Wells–produced series used to do ones that were just as long and elaborate in the nineties and early aughts. Some were as long as the justly celebrated “keep it going” shots in films by Martin Scorsese, Brian DePalma, and Alfonso Cuarón: three minutes, four, five. There have been, and continue to be, other examples of great, long tracking shots. Scandal has done some great ones in the last few years, and Treme used to do them regularly (traveling from character to character for as long as two or three minutes, to visually drive home the idea that ultimately everyone is connected). The best long tracking shots are so elegantly executed that the single-take approach affects you subliminally, so that you come away thinking not, “Wow, that was all done with no cuts,” but something more like, “Wow, that was emotionally affecting for some reason,” or “How clever of them to save that last big reveal for the very end of the scene,” after which you go back and watch the scene again and realize what, exactly, you were looking at. On the opposite end of the subtlety spectrum, you’ve got tracking shots like the ones in the X-Files episode “Triangle,” one of the most ambitiously directed (by creator Chris Carter) episodes of series TV I’ve ever watched. The plot unfolded, à la True Detective, in two different time frames: 1939 and 1998. Carter, who also wrote the episode, staged the past- and present-tense versions of his heroes Scully and Mulder so that they seemed to be eerily in sync, at times even passing each other like ghosts in the same haunted house. As I wrote at the time, “The greatest minute of TV this year is the scene where
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Mulder runs down a hallway of the ocean liner with the 1939 Scully in tow while in 1998, the real Scully walks down the same hallway looking for Mulder. Thanks to the wonders of split-screen — i.e., two square images placed sideby-side — Mulder and the 1939 Scully turn a corner at the same time that our Scully turns it. The two parties seem to pass each other...In a single stunning image, Carter collapses time, space and identity — and makes a funny joke, too. It’s the shot of the year.” There’s nothing in the True Detective shot that’s as conceptually rich as what Carter did in “Triangle,” but the showiness of it is very effective in its own right, because it departs from the meticulous puzzle-piece construction of the rest of the initial four episodes. The intensity and controlled wildness of the sequence — which follows Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and a gang of bigoted white bikers as they try to rob black drug dealers in a housing project, then escape before they all get killed—feels like a long-delayed eruption of deeply buried madness. In the rest of this episode and most of episode three, we’ve been watching Cohle contrive, very carefully, to “lose it,” as if willing himself to re-become the deep-cover agent he’d been several years earlier, at the expense of his family and anything resembling a stable, “normal” life. The filmmakers paved the way for this shot by showing Cohle leaving the biker bar on a boat and disappearing into darkness, as if he were Captain Willard going upriver to find and kill Colonel Kurtz. Will True Detective continue to follow this chain of association? If so, don’t be surprised if the series gets crazier and crazier and crazier as it goes along, until it disintegrates. (1)
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Sion Isaacs Shankel February 10 11:19 pm
Oh the studying I got to do....
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Sion Isaacs Shankel February 10 11:19 pm
First I just savor a million times...
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For the Live and Learn File: It’s clear that I should have named this group “True Detective Has Warped My Fragile Little Mind.”
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Damn, over the top or not, that was the second best 58 minutes I spent today.
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Jason Shankel February 11 1:49 am
Second best? I gather that you went on a personal crankfueled drug heist through the projects before the show? ;)
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Christina Scannapiego February 11 2:15 pm
Jason Shankel, I’m always more productive in the morning.
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Jason Shankel February 11 2:15 am
Morning is nothing but an arbitrary ritualization of the Earth’s angular momentum masquerading as religious awe and the false promise of forgiveness and renewal that never comes.
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Jason Shankel February 11 San Francisco California United States
Christina Scannapiego February 11
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Jason Shankel via True Detective February 11 San Francisco California United States
D day... True Detective Season 1: Episode #4 Subscribe to the HBO YouTube: http://itsh. bo/10qIqsj Watch new episodes of True Detective every Sunday at 9PM, only on HBO. Connect with True Detective: Fin...
February 29
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Jason Shankel February 11 2:18 am
Lisa would be well advised to take “fuck off” for an answer. Granted, Mr. “I’m Not A Psycho” clearly is and he’s responsible for his lunatic bullshit, but that’s all the more reason to take being blown off as a blessing.
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Hannah Loveless Pal-al February 11 2:24 am
I agree-- a somewhat normal person would take the blow-off and run, but Lisa is no slouch in the lunatic bullshit department either. A thoroughly ugly relationship that would have taken a lot more ugly to finish it off if Marty had been not married.
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Jason Shankel February 11 2:41 am
They say “don’t stick your dick in crazy.” ‘They’ being Cohle here. But some guys...well... some guys ain’t got a choice because crazy is all that will come within 50 feet of them.
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https://twitter.com/RustCohle_HBO
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Jason Shankel February 11 San Francisco California United States
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Jason Shankel February 11 San Francisco California United States
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Jason Shankel February 12 San Francisco California United States
https://twitter.com/MartinHart_HBO Martin Hart HBO (MartinHart_ HBO) on Twitter @ 5:50: steadicam operator follows Cohle and Uncle of Anarchy through yard to fence... steps on Man Sized Jib(tm), is raised over fence, planted on the other side and continues tracking without a hiccup. Because insane. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVK_scFlCHg True Detective - 6 minute tracking shot That single, unedited tracking shot from 0:38 to 6:36.
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John Devennie Sr. February 12 3:10 am
Many Many questions. Marty is a psych case. His road runner speech (seemed desperate) to his wife and his persona with Lisa at first being handcuffed. Then his rage at Charlie in the jail (and why was Charlie chained this time and not in the first interview). Several Martys in there each in DENIAL of the other.
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John Devennie Sr. February 12 9:37 pm
Marty: “The detective’s worst mistake when you don’t see the answer when it is right under your nose.” Maybe this applies to the whole mystery here . . .
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I thought that sequence was totally cool
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Vaughn Carl Brown February 12 9:44 pm
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So what are everyone’s thoughts on “Carcosa” and “The King In Yellow?” I previous posts, I laid out my theory that this is an intentional feeding of the “Satanist” angle, designed to hook the “God botherers” with the religious angle and Cohle with the highly constructed narrative angle. My prime suspect is Marty. The dates in the show (1995, 2012) line up with important dates in the “West Memphis Three” case. If you haven’t seen “Paradise Lost,” check it out. My operating th...eory is that it’s a skeleton key for True Detective. Could be wrong. This is one of those “probably not, but I got no better idea” type of deals. But enough about me...what do you think? How does “The King In Yellow” play into this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NNdCP9z2cM
Jason Shankel February 12 San Francisco California United States
HBO ParadiseLost Pt1 TheChildMurdersAtRobinHoodHills A horrific triple murder leads to an indictment and trial of three non-conformist boys based on questionable evidence. youtube.com
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Jason Shankel February 13 San Francisco California United States
Another interesting real-life case that could have some bearing on True Detective is Henry Lee Lucas, who was fictionalized in “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.” When he was caught, Lucas confessed to something like a half billion murders and claimed to be part of a network of satanic ritual abusers. He confessed to killing Jimmy Hoffa. The cops bought every word, except maybe the Hoffa thing. They flew him around the country, gave him deluxe (for a death row inmate) a... ccommodations, good food and treated him like a celebrity to “coax” him into giving details on his killings. So now police stations all around the country were able to close cases and get on TV having “caught” a super-predator, and Henry gets to be the center of attention everywhere he goes. So what if they gave him the case files before his “confessions?” So what if they corrected any details he’d get wrong when visiting a crime scene? She was stabbed? Oh, no, the victim was male and he was strangled. Oh, that’s right, I strangled him. There’s little doubt that he was a killer, but he was only sentenced to death for one killing, an unidentified female dubbed “Orange Socks” because that’s all she was wearing. The evidence against him in this case was so dubious that Governor George W. Bush commuted his sentence to life on recommendation of the parole board. Lucas was the only death row prisoner spared by Governor Bush. Rewatching “Henry” and imagining it as a delusional fantasy a la “American Psycho” is an interesting exercise, especially the scene where Henry talks about killing his mother (which evidently the real Henry actually did) and can’t remember how he did it.
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Jason Shankel February 13 San Francisco California United States
Our “Start Asking The Right Fucking Questions” film of the week is ‘Deceiver,’ starring Tim Roth, Michael Rooker and Chris Penn. It’s an unreliable-narrator confession procedural noir thriller from the mid 90s. Not bad, though a bit ponderous and over the top at times. Rooker goes full Marty Hart in this one. Don’t mow Rooker’s lawn. Just...just let him mow it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbB_D4MbkF0 Deceiver (Liar) [1997] Full movie Storyline Textile company heir Wayland is accused of murder of a prostitute named Elizabeth, whose body was found cut in two in the park. The murder is inves... youtube.com|By Les McCann
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Jason Shankel via True Detective February 13 San Francisco California United States
True Detective Season 1: Inside the Episode #4 (HBO) Subscribe to the HBO YouTube: http://itsh. bo/10qIqsj Watch new episodes of True Detective every Sunday at 9PM, only on HBO. Connect with True Detective: Fin... youtube.com
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Jason Shankel February 13 9:23 pm
“Todd’s Uncles,” circa 1995?
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Simon Tahar February 13 9:23 pm
Meth Damon
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Jason Shankel February 13 9:23 pm
Definitely have to work up a “which fictional outlaw Aryan biker gang are you?” quiz.
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