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I still think that the final episode of season 2 may very well be the greatest in-context episode of television that has ever been produced. "Boy the Earth Speaks To" is the title, I think - as it is our introduction to Hearst, after all, which was the culmination of a number of plot threads from season 2... But that episode isn't just the culmination of a bunch of exposition... The whole episode has an almost organic rhythm, and more than any other episode of that show, all the dialogue and all the motions and all the shots and especially the editing conveys this rapid sense of "poo poo going down" in every possible way, and a reckoning coming to nearly each and every character that's been stewing since the very first episode, in some cases. It ALL culminates in one sequence that's as close to perfect as anything I've ever seen in TV or film. And the wonderful thing is in addition to what I was just talking - being like a PERFECT finale for both Seasons 1 and 2 - it also feels like... a joyous celebration! It does, after all, end with a wedding - unconventional as it may be - and it's truly wonderful joyful moment.... Now, I love season 3, don't get me wrong, but I would have been a lot happier with season 2 being the end of the series, rather than season 3, if only because the season 2 finale felt like such a perfect wrapping up of what we'd seen so far. The ending of season 3, on the other hand, felt like it, uh.... left the audience wanting a bit of satisfaction and with less satisfaction and more a raw feeling of injustice with a bit of solace thrown in here and there (Joanie and Jane  )
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Nov 11, 2018 19:22
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I don't think Deadwood gets nearly enough credit for the "minor stuff", by which I mean how incredibly amazing the show always looked, and just how important that was to everything that was going on.. By which I mean primarily aspects of the production such as the set design and the costumes and the makeup and so forth. You really, truly feel the sense of it as an actual, physical place the occupies real and actual space and never for a moment did I ever get "taken out of the moment" by anything especially anachronistic or distracting, and that immersion is so key to the performances, too. I can only imagine it's easier to get into character when you've got the production team, like... re-building half the town, practically, from what I understand. Which I'm sure is part of the reason why the Gem Saloon and the Hardware Store and the Bella Union and so on all feel so incredibly authentic... Well, anyway. The acting and the writing always gets so much attention (and deservedly so) but I love how every time you watch a season of Deadwood it's like actually visiting the town, almost.
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Nov 17, 2018 03:16
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If any of you folks haven't watched the show in like 7-8 years or something (like me) you should SERIOUSLY re-watch it in all of its entirety before this finale... I mean, I know everyone always says this when they revisit a great show after a period of time, but it's SO much better now - I am noticing so many more things, and I feel like I must have been so distracted by things and hosed up back when I watched it the first couple times that I simply DID NOT SEE or did not understand some of the more 'subtle' (yet still pretty obvious) elements of the show. I've only re-watched the first 8 episodes of Season 1, but there are just SO MANY THINGS... Like, I never fully understood the meaning of Bullock's fight with the Indian when he goes after McCall, and I never totally understood why it was Charlie who found him or WHY Bullock was marked like Cain from the encounter... The biggest thing I missed there was the mirroring between the Indian that Bullock fought, and Bullock himself. That Indian was performing a funeral rite for "his dead friend", who is headless. We can probably assume that his friend's head was the same one that the hooplehead brought into camp with much excitement at almost the *exact same time* that McCall shot Hickock. It's the same head that winds up in the box that Al talks to a great deal in later seasons, in fact, as I recall... But anyway, it was all very apparent to me how Bullock and that Indians were essentially brothers - both mourning the loss of a good friend and doing what they thought was the right and proper thing to do to avenge the death of their respective friend, in a way. And Bullock ends up killing him, and is so marked like Cain by God after killing his own brother - as the Reverend points out, in fact, just before a seizure. The other part that makes tremendously more sense is the use of first Corinthians 1:12-31 (I think?) which the Reverend reads from at Wild Bill's funeral.... "14 For the body does not consist of one member but of many. 15 If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. 16 And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body..." And so on, that might not be the translation or the precise part used in the show but it's the overall gist. And I did not really understand how it was about the manner in which everyone in Deadwood has a relationship to the town itself, in a way - how Bullock, despite being unwilling, MUST be an appendage of the body of Deadwood simply by virtue of being who he is, and living there. Same with Al, or EB, or Jane, and so on... The first time I had about the same reaction as Bullock, who rants to Sol Star, "What in hell was all that? What part of my part is your part? High water the man never made much sense, but now..." But now it makes a great deal more sense and that reverend seems much less crazy and incomprehensible... I also would like to point out what an underrated star of the show in the first season has got to be Brad Dourif. He rarely seems to get talked about much but it feels like he's onscreen as much as ANY other star of the show in the first season, and just does a positively tremendous job. Same with the second season really... Both his performance and screen time went down in season and I remember noticing it, and missing his presence.
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Nov 21, 2018 16:59
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Escobarbarian posted:That Corinthians quote really is one of the most important things in the whole series. It’s basically the entire mission statement behind the show. It really is - I would say it's more like uh... the thesis statement of (at least) the first two seasons. I'd love it if they revisited it in some oblique fashion in this film. Along with that quote, I think much can be learned by comparing and contrasting the funeral of Wild Bill Hickock (and the text surrounding it) with the funeral of Bullock's son, which is presided over by Andy Cramed, near the end of season 2.
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Nov 21, 2018 23:42
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Holy poo poo - even Jeffrey Jones is returning as Merrick. I thought he had like, totally and completely quit acting. That's honestly a surprise he's like the one guy I'd think wouldn't be back for uh, various reasons. I guess Deadwood was actually the one thing he did after his conviction of note, though. He even has an attractive teenage male apprentice according to IMdB credits... 
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Nov 22, 2018 12:57
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drat, the actor who played Johnny Burns has been in quite a bit... He played 'Old Nick' in the film 'Room' which like, makes Johnny a bit creepier to me. I don't know how they're all going to fit this into what.... ~120 minutes? It just seems weird to get everyone back together 10 years later and only make a "feature length" film. It seems kind of arbitrary and weird to me when you can basically go with any format you want.... Not like this will be in theaters, sadly.
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Nov 22, 2018 19:43
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In a totally ideal world, Milch would have emulated Lynch and had an entire 18-episode arc ready to go! Or you know, he could have just done 4 episodes, like you said - that wouldn't have been so bad! I mean, for Lynch 4 episodes was just what he released on the first night for the premiere when he revisited Twin Peaks summer before last... It honestly sort of sucks, in a way, because I feel like the extent to which that Twin Peaks reunion season was so goddamn fantastic, I now have sky-high expectations for this Deadwood movie - and that ain't necessarily a good thing! I'm really gonna have to lower my expectations and remind myself that it USUALLY doesn't kinda work out too well when shows do this all the time...
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Nov 22, 2018 20:52
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I don't know why but one of my favorite Timothy Olyphant performances is in Dreamcatcher where he plays a drunken Maine car salesman with psychic powers (which he only uses to fail at getting laid) who nearly gets his dick bitten off by a shitweasel during a snowstorm. That's like, the entire story arc. And he plays it to the hilt! It's actually kinda worth seeing the movie just for the weirdness of seeing Olyphant, Damien Lewis, Thomas Jane, and Jason Lee playing 4 loser buddies from Maine... It's really funny that Jason Lee was the most recognizable name on that list at the time this was made in 2003. Really, I don't think the other 3 had done much of anything of too much note at that point. Maybe part of why I like that ridiculous flick is because I'm from Maine and I love that Olyphant was the only one who even attempted a Maine accent (didn't quite get it but it's hilarious to watch) but I sincerely enjoy that film for all it's awfulness and weirdness. kaworu fucked around with this message at 00:19 on Nov 24, 2018 |
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Nov 24, 2018 00:16
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I've been thinking about what an utterly fantastic word "cocksucker" is merely in terms of the way it sounds - it has an almost... refreshing sound to it, I think. Like "Alka-seltzer" or "Coca-cola". "Cocksucker" feels good and satisfying to say - it never struck me as mean-sounding either, like 'friend of the family' or 'human being' which not only have vile meanings but even SOUND vile while saying or hearing them. Cocksucker, on the other hand, doesn't really mean anything bad at all (most of my best friends throughout life have been cocksuckers, I'm a cockucker, etc). It's like what George Carlin always said about the word, except I would add "nice queer man" as well as woman... But that kind messes up the joke. Anyway, another note on my rewatch: Holy poo poo I had COMPLETELY forgotten that Sarah Paulson plays Miss Isringhausen! And she looks SO freaking young, yet the remarkable thing was she was already like 30 back in 2005! That would have been like 6+ years before even the *first* season of American Horror Story, and season 2 of that season was what made me (and a lot of other people) really start to take note of her I think. Just amazing that she had a fantastic part like that on this show in 2005. She's honestly older than I thought.
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Nov 24, 2018 01:13
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Professor Shark posted:Speaking of endings, I just finished the Season 1 finale. It's insanely good, and I think the best finale to a season I've ever seen. Toxic Fart Syndrome posted:I think this may be TV’s Don Quixote for how well the rewatches hold up. I really, really need to echo these statements.... I've still barely begun to watch the second season of Deadwood yet, in part because the entirety of season 1, and the ending especially, was just honestly so much better and deeper and more complete and more meaningful. Threads in the story that seemed a little bit "scattershot" to me the first couple times I watched the show like 10+ years ago are now revealed as being utterly precise and integral to the story as a whole. And you also notice certain quiet moments of beauty that break your heart on this show. Watching Jewel fall in the thoroughfare, and then pick herself back up again.. Or the moment that passes late in the season in the morning sun betweem Al, swigging whiskey to hide his eyes going red-rimmed, on the balcony and a severely dilapidated Reverend Smith halfway between a fit and some sort of religious terror/bliss. Tons of little amazing moments like that. There's also the fact that when I first saw this show I was in my early twenties and was a lot more ignorant about 19th century American politics, and significantly I did not remotely understand just what a shattering, traumatizing, horrifying thing The Civil War actually was for America. I didn't truly understand a whole lot beyond the basic facts, which is like nothing. Since then I've seen documentaries and read books and listened to lectures (not that it was a passion of mine but I just hadn't quite 'gotten there' before in terms of having a solid grasp on the gravity of the events). Even though there's almost no direct mention of the Civil War in all of Season 1, it definitely looms over the characters and the events the entire time. Kinda like Al's picture of Lincoln, it's always there and yet everyone very pointedly has no loving interest in talking about it. And I do think the reference to the picture of Lincoln which before was only shot in the background a bit blurrily before that scene (and almost forever after that scene) is Milch making a direct reference to the way the show handles the Civil War - as in the background and always there (Al can't take it down even if it does make the sale of oval office go down). There's a lot of other cool stuff I noticed about season 1, but this post is too long already. I will say that I've been watching Westworld for the first time since I finished Season 1 of Deadwood, and boy does that vision of the west seem totally antiseptic and bizarrely clean compared to Deadwood; but then I guess that's the point, and what they were going for. Leastways I hope it was.
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Nov 29, 2018 02:51
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Mu Zeta posted:I'm still waiting for the Terry Gilliam movie But uh, The Fisher King came out like... at least 25 years ago, right? I really thought that was about as perfect as a Terry Gilliam take on Don Quixote could be, and Williams had the perfect combo of manic/frightening comedic energy that keeps him moving forward always, combined with the sort of unspeakable sadness and sense of trauma and lost dreams that belie the character. Anyway I mean, I couldn't really think of a more perfect Quixote than Williams and it's kind of a relief that he already made a Quixote-ish film with Gilliam already. I doubt this new Gilliam Quixote flick will be like, better than The Fisher King - either as a rough Quixote adaptation or a film in general. Which is honestly a bit sad. edit: Quick pronunciation question: I know that Quixote is pronounced "Key-Ho-Tay" (more or less, anyway) but what about the word 'quixotic'? I always pronounced it as "Quick-Sot-Ick" (again more or less) but now I am wondering whether the odd (for English) pronunciation holds true; maybe it's "Key-Hot-Ick" or something.. kaworu fucked around with this message at 13:41 on Nov 29, 2018 |
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Nov 29, 2018 13:31
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Fantastic post Archyduchess - you put that a lot better than I could have. Saying that it traumatized the entire country and sort of gutted American culture and shattered a lot of romantic illusions and dreams that people had about... a lot of things is quite true. All sorts of aspects of their lives was also gone forever in the case of the south, which of course suffered the most in the wake of the Civil War by far. Some would argue that much of the south *still* has yet to fully recover economically, and I'd actually agree to some extent. Perhaps they'll never fully recover - they certainly can't from a cultural standpoint. Think about the fact that ONLY in the last couple years have Confederate monuments and statues started to come down en masse, and even still there are places where the Stars and Bars'll probably always fly. I think it's very difficult for us to really comprehend just how profoundly it affected people at the time though, really. I can only imagine that the way a human life was fundamentally valued was very different, at the time. And just to speak to the brutality of the combat, as it was pointed out the technology of war was in an especially vicious place. Battles were fought generally with large-caliber rifles (more precise than muskets but stil brutally large balls of steel) and bayonets (old-school cannons for artillery) and if you got shot in, say, an arm or a leg, it would usually shatter the bone past medical help, insuring the limb in question would need to be amputated - and boy were a lot of limbs amputated in that war. Bayonet wounds weren't particularly kind either. Battles were close, brutal, intimate affairs and the rate of carnage seemed astronomical to people at the time. Remember this was before antibiotics, and you had these soldiers who were already going through hell and living in horribly filthy conditions, so you were pretty lucky if you got shot or cut and didn't die of sepsis. In Deadwood for instance, Reverend Smith talks about being at the battle of Shiloh as a medic which was where he "got his calling", which frankly explains a lot about the minister.. Shiloh was one of the most brutal, bloody battles in the entire war - some 20,000 casualties accumulated on *both sides*, with about 3,000 of them dying - all that in just *2 days* of fighting. That might not seem too extreme in the 21st century, but at the time I believe it was the first time anywhere near so many men were killed/hurt in such few days of fighting. Though, that record was soon surpassed at Antietam, then ultimately surpassed by Gettysburg. If you were a field medic at Shiloh and had any sort of compassion in you, I would imagine that the two options were basically insanity and getting religion (most likely both) so it does explain quite a bit about Smith's character kaworu fucked around with this message at 02:24 on Dec 1, 2018 |
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Dec 1, 2018 00:31
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Cojawfee posted:Men would also like on the battlefield for hours or even days before someone could get to them. There was a story of wounded men lying in a field over night and that the men who survived had a mysterious blue glow about them. People thought that it was some sort of miracle, but it was actually some nematode or something that glows blue. It vomits up bacteria to digest things and then eats the bacteria to harvest what the bacteria digested. This bacteria killed the bad pathogens in the men's wounds and kept them alive. That's so goddamn fascinating and cool about the nematodes! I'd never read about that before, and to be honesty when I first read your post I thought it had to be bullshit or something because it seemed so far out, but nope. 100% true. The soil bacterium Photorhabdus luminescens which is present only in nematodes (who, unlike the show Doub would have us believe, are tiny parasitic worms that usually burrow into insect larvae (maggots) in the soil or into plants, and vomit up this Photorhabdus luminescens which is the bacterium that killed the host larvae.. Why this was so exceptional and bizarre is that nematodes would typically die from the simple heat of a human body before the Photorhabdus luminescens it vomits could release the chemicals that destroy the host larvae and any other microorganisms - this is how the nematodes saved the soldiers and gave them the ghostly bio-luminescent glow, and they could only have done it *because* the soldiers were freezing cold lying on wet soil in early April. Also of note - this incident with the nematodes actually happened after The Battle of Shiloh, which was in Tennessee April 6-7 1862 if memory holds. And I'd apparently forgotten, but Reverend Smith also claims being at Second Manassas, AKA The Battle of Bull Run. If you recall history, this happened... well, late in the summer of 1862 as I recall, and was a battle that the Union army should have won by all rights, but lost due to a combination of the ineptitude of Union General John Pope (whom I believe was subsequently relieved by Lincoln) and the unparalleled strategic genius of Robert E. Lee. Lincoln was basically furious that his senior general at the time, McClellan, was being entirely too conservative and not doing enough to proactively use his superiority in numbers and discipline effectively to bear on Lee. This backfired tremendously when he appointed Pope to lead the Virgina army, and the result was that Lee correctly guessed how the impatience of Lincoln and the conservativeness of McClellan (whom I believe Lee had personally worked with a great deal prior to Secession and knew quite well) would play it, and he used that to GREAT effect in Second Manassas. It may not have been as awful as Shiloh earlier in the year, but it was plenty horrific and terrible. It was also an especially demoralizing loss for Lincoln and the Union... It was in the winter following the disastrous summer of 1862 (for the Union) that Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation - as much as a measure to do everything possible to win the war as it was a statement of his own personal ethical beliefs, but I probably don't need to get into all that. But it really was a fascinating decision - the war was NOT about ending slavery until that Proclamation, it was about maintaining the union. By making an explicit statement that slavery was unethical, it was basically Lincoln changed the goalposts and essentially re-energize his cause... Plus hopefully inspiring slaves to flee the south and join the Union Army to fight for their peoples freedom. But in many ways it was also a response to the horrifying possibility that the North MIGHT really and truly lose this war somehow, and I don't think that the Union truly saw that as a possibility before then. Ugh, history. I am glad you guys find this stuff interesting - The Civil War is a truly remarkable time in American History, and I'd say it's worth studying at the moment. edit: Oh, and as an addendum to all of this, I'm currently in the midst of re-reading Robert Caro's 4-part biography of Lyndon Johnson, and the current one I'm on is called Master of the Senate and is all about Johnson, a fairly young and idealistic senator at the time, was SO intelligent and driven and motivated that after he was elected to the Senate in 1948 (at the time the Senate had an even worse reputation for archaic uselessness than it does even now) and through all kinds of wheeling and dealing and just running intellectual circles around everyone else, became the youngest majority leader in history and proceeded to past the first Civil Rights legislation (in the 1950's) that had literally been passed since reconstruction. If you ever find yourself wondering how the Democrats went from what they HAD BEEN to cementing their reputation as the party of new-deal socialism, liberalism, and progressive politics, then LBJ is really the missing link. Not to discount FDR, but he's always been much more popular and loved and more easily understood than LBJ in many ways. I mean, Johnson's the democratic Southerner who presided over the passing of The Civil Rights Act of 1965. I almost view the biography and the political story of LBJ as being rather bound up in the political/racial issues and realities that were plaguing post-war (WW2 in this case) America at the time - segregation, Jim Crow laws, black folks not having the vote... These things were even becoming hopelessly anachronistic in the south by 1950, in many ways. Not to mention the cognitive dissonance about the war against fascism we had just fought, and the fact that, like the Germans, we still isolated a racial class of people in America and didn't provide them with the same full and equal rights as white Americans. Anyway I'll stop, I just feel like I have to recommend Caro as much as possible to people who have never read his stuff. His biography of Johnson is just, in short, the greatest political writing I've ever read. I would frankly recommend anyone to start with Book 3, Master of the Senate, which is really the most intriguing and fascinating and eye-opening of all the 4 books, IMO. kaworu fucked around with this message at 15:26 on Dec 1, 2018 |
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Dec 1, 2018 14:41
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Part of what killed so many people was simply, as you said, very large armies were able to mobilize fairly effectively. But the other part of this is just how intractable both sides had become; the longer the war went on and the more people died on both sides, the more utterly dedicated either side was (perhaps the confederates had a bigger reputation for this). So both sides were literally throwing every ounce of their strength and people into winning this war. Ever hear the term "Attrition"? Warfare by attrition? It means trying to win a war where neither side will easily surrender (like the ACW) by allowing essentially vast numbers of troops on both sides to fight to the death, in the knowledge that because your side ultimately has more resources and people at their disposal, they will still be left standing at the end. This was the strategy that Ulysses S. Grant employed (endorsed and supported by Lincoln) to painfully grind down the confederate army by grinding down his own army in the process. This is a BIG reason why the war was so bloody.. I mean, there's a reason why Archyduchess referred to it as a meat grinder; that's precisely what it was, for both sides. Bloody as it was, the Union did win in the end. But in a real sense, I always view the African-Americans as the only true "winners" in the Civil War.. The union suffered a great deal, I think there's a decent argument to be made that amidst all the horror the one truly great positive was the passing of the 13th Amendment. I know most have seen it, but Lincoln really is a fabulously wonderful film specifically about this subject. DDL is of course jaw-dropping as Lincoln, but it's Tommy Lee Jones playing Thaddeus Stevens really steals the show I think. I actually think the film is sort of apropos to Deadwood.. In fact, it rather reminded me of Deadwood in terms off actually portraying the gritty and dirty reality of the ~1860-70s, rather than the long-romanticized pastiche of it that we're rather more used to seeing, even today in many westerns.
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Dec 1, 2018 17:33
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This whole conversation has definitely been cool - people who know more about this than me have been very informative and made me want to, well, check out more about how it all went down. Also, I can't say I'm a *huge* fan of Ken Burns, but I found his documentary series on the Civil War to be fairly decent if you want a general overview of the war... It's certainly not perfect and can be a bit much at times if you're the sort of person who isn't particularly imaginative or easily bored by a lot of talking and slow zoomouts of photographs, heh. It's not like there's any video of what happened, but there are endless photographs in the documentary that are pretty great, and maps and illustrations of how many of the key battles played out. I'd have to say that it was worth watching if only as a solid and fairly complete record/overview of the major battles and events of the war, plus it's a very nice presentation of a lot of great photographs and gives some solid and varying perspectives on certain events. It's not BAD, it's not even mediocre - it's just not all that exceptional or great. But as it's on Netflx (at least in the USA) it's very available. kaworu fucked around with this message at 20:38 on Dec 1, 2018 |
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Dec 1, 2018 20:35
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The book I would really recommend people read/listen to having to do with the Civil War is probably Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin. She's a fabulous writer, and it's an absolutely masterful book that paints the most real and true portrait of Lincoln that I've ever encountered in any sort of media. It is LIGHT YEARS better than the stupid Ken Burns documentary, and definitely FAR more worth your time, now that I really think about it. Listening to that book is better than watching the documentary! Actually, I guess the film Lincoln was somewhat based on Goodwin's book, but it's taking like... one small aspect/part of the book and bringing it to life on the screen. The boook itself is much more about what was really going on in Lincoln's administration; the title refers to the cabinet which Lincoln assembled at the start of his first term, in 1860. Going very much against the grain of political wisdom (then or now) he chose to populate his cabinet with all his main rivals for the Republican nominations, partially in an effort to unify the party at what was a time that required as much unity as politics would allow for.
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Dec 2, 2018 03:53
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fawning deference posted:I read ToR and loved it to death. How is her book on LBJ? Nowhere nearly as good as Caro's books about LBJ! I'll take any excuse to talk more about this, hah. My father was always a huge fan of Caro from way back, but even so it took him a while to actually get me truly excited to read an incomplete multi-part biography about Lyndon Baines Johnson - I didn't really understand what made him all that significant when at the time it seemed to me that the two presidents bookending him (Kennedy and Nixon) seemed to be "bigger" names which certainly carried more weight in the mythology of American politics. Of course, the truth is that LBJ was a far more dynamic and complex individual than either Kennedy or Nixon, and in many ways was the consummate politician of his time who achieved absolutely incredible goddamn things that a lot of people just don't know all too much about. I think Master of the Senate is a great starting point even though it's Caro's third book in the series. It just goes through a particularly fascinating time in American politics, the 1950's, that I did not know a tremendous deal about the intricacies and ins and outs thereof. And Johnson was really the central figure behind the scenes in American politics at the time, doing unprecedented things. And by the way, Caro has been working on this multi-part biography of LBJ since uh... at least 1974 (!) I think. He's been releasing about a book every decade more or less, and released the 4th book in 2013. He's working on the fifth book which is probably going to be the final given Caro's age. But I'd say on the whole it's arguably the greatest piece of American political journalism.. I can't think of many things that really compare with it, in that regard. fake edit: Caro's first book, The Power Broker which is all about Robert Moses and is just a goddamn mesmerizing piece of work. Moses was probably the most powerful unelected public official in the 20th century, and a longtime rival to FDR. He's probably the man who is singly most responsible for making New York City into what it is today, for better or worse. Very complex and fascinating figure whose name your average millennial probably doesn't even recognize.
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Dec 2, 2018 06:05
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R. Guyovich posted:lincoln is liberal pablum with quasi-historical sheen, sorry. thaddeus stevens abandoning his principles is treated as a big heroic moment and spielberg throws in some black characters to cheer over being called equal before the law rather than human beings deserving of dignity. I don't know. It certainly has a liberal bent, but it's a loving Tony Kushner script based on a Doris Kearns Goodwin novel directed by Spielberg; what in gently caress do you expect? And of course it's going to be skewed towards the triumphant/great moments during the civil war rather than representing the actual reality of the Civil War, which was sickness and suffering and death. He did the same drat thing with Schindler's List, and that offended some people too. In both cases he told tales depicting human dignity and the sanctity of human life and equal rights over actually depicting the reality of the actual events. Which in both cases was near-endless suffering and death for a protracted period of time, ultimately. But this is what Spielberg does - he's always fundamentally optimistic about human nature in most of his films. In any case, it was Tony Kushner who wrote the script and you should drat well credit the stuff with Stevens to him, not Spielberg, as it reeks of Kushner (not necessarily in a bad way in my opinion). He just has a tendency to portray characters like that from a highly romantic point of view. I took Lincoln's thesis on Stevens to be that he was doing all of these things almost entirely out of his love for his wife. That's why he allows Mary Todd to publicly humiliate him without saying a word, and that's why he "abandons his principles", as you put it. Except he was not abandoning his principles, he was simply saying what was necessary for him to say in the moment to achieve his goals. And yes, it's portrayed as heroic in the film, but we only truly understand how and why until that final scene with him where he lays down with his wife and has her read it to him. I thought the film should have ended right there, in a way. Again, maybe I'm just a hopeless romantic, too. But I cannot think of anything more incredibly romantic than deciding to break the bonds of an entire people out of an intense and sincere love for one of them. What is more romantic than declaring, "I will free you and all the people here like you in the same situation!" and actually doing it? Before Lincoln was even made I became positive OBSESSED with the film Lawrence of Arabia (certainly a film worthy of obsession) and I wound up reading several biographies of T.E. Lawrence, along with his Seven Pillars. What was so amazing and romantic about his story is that before the war he had of course already been captivated by the desert and living in such a place... Lawrence did not really have any sort of "normal" kind of sexuality and tended towards sadomasochism in later life, possibly as a result of experiences during the war. I hesitate to label him as homosexual, but apparently living in Egypt before the war he had fallen deeply in love with, and was living with, a teenage Bedouin boy for some years. In fact, the dedication in his Seven Pillars of Wisdom (his own account of his wartime exploits) is to this boy, who sadly died before the war even began. In any case, similar to Thaddeus Stevens in some ways, Lawrence had resolved to set free this boy's entire people however he possibly could manage it, even after the boy had died. And in some ways he achieved this - he certainly did everything humanly (sometimes super-humanly) to try and get this done. Maybe I'm just a sap but I find stories like this in history to be incredibly captivating and romantic, and regardless of the extent of the truth of these stories, in either case, I don't really care. These sorts of side-stories are what makes history feel alive, and human. Call me a sap for liberal pablum if you like.
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Dec 3, 2018 13:35
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That impression is one of the funniest goddamn things ever and I'm like SLIGHTLY annoyed you posted it because it's always such a treat to see a scene like that on Deadwood where there's something just TOTALLY unexpectedly hilarious like that. I freaking lost it when I watched that episode last weekend and got to that scene. I probably rewound it at least 7 or 8 times before I could move on, it's so great.. OK, it was probably twice that many times. I probably watched it a dozen times just laughing at the way Al says "Rose'. Ohhh man. I had never noticed Titus Welliver having to actually cover and straighten his mouth to keep from totally losing composure though - makes me wonder if he'd heard McShane do that impression of Sanderson as EB before. Like, I almost imagine McShane being a massive fan of the character just from their scenes together and spending hours in his trailer perfecting the voice and never telling anyone or something, I don't know  It's too goddamn perfect and hilarious to have been his first attempt.And frankly I can imagine it being harder and harder not to laugh with each subsequent take as that impression is so goddamn funny... Hell, the whole conversation is, with Al actually being kinda fuckin' scared visibly for the first time ever on the show.
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Dec 5, 2018 22:03
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:On this rewatch, I'm really just not enjoying Jane. She annoys me and I don't find her sympathetic. Joanie's Island of Misfit Toys is the weakest part of the whole series. At least the theater troupe has Brian Cox hamming it up. At least Aunt Lou's stories often involve more Richardson, who I love. I don't think the Third Season is really close to being the masterpieces that Seasons 1 + 2 are, especially when taken as a whole. I'm not saying that season 3 isn't great, fantastic television, because it is. It's still better than a tremendous amount of other shows that don't hold a candle to it, but it's inevitably a letdown after season 2. But by the very same token, I think almost ANY season of television from any show, ever, would be a letdown after something the quality of Deadwood Season 2. I really don't quite think it can really be overstated just how perfect that season really is. There's not a boring moment or a wasted breath or line. And I definitely think the final episode of the season is the best episode, which probably makes it the single best episode of television ever produced. It's funny - I almost feel like Season 3 is like more of a sequel to that SINGLE episode, rather than the entire series. It kinda feels like Milch just looked at that episode and it was just SO loving rich with narrative that he could just make a whole entire season filling in the blanks created by that episode, and that's really kinda what he did - with a few exceptions, like making Hearst downright demonic instead of just utterly mercenary, the actors showing up, Aunt Lou and her son - a few things like that. But otherwise, it all flows out of the way that the season 2 finale simultaneously wrapped up each and every last plotline while also leaving it all gloriously open-ended with possibility. I know we all like the season 3 finale for its understated beauty, but I'm pretty sure we all loving LOVE the season 2 finale. This last rewatch has really driven home just how much I do kinda wish it had ended there, much as I enjoy the hell out of season 3. Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:I still have the emails from Netflix about Deadwood when I watched it on DVD the first and only other time. Records show that I watched the whole series one mailed out disc at a time, five discs a season, between 8/30 and 10/30 back in 2007. I hope nobody ever forgets what an absolute miracle it is to be able to just hit the "next episode" button. OK, you're making me feel a bit old because when I was growing up, you had to either freaking record stuff with your VCR (or in my case your BetaMax player!) off TV if you were going to miss an episode of a show you loved - like say The X-Files, and you'd have to deal with stuff like your brother not realizing it and changing the channel halfway through to watch professional wrestling or some poo poo. And that was it, you were screwed and would never see that episode again except maybe someday in syndication and you might NEVER find out how it ended... It's pretty mindblowing to me that Twin Peaks ever existed in the first place. I really don't think most people understand at all how much the entire ouevre of modern drama television is built almost entirely on the shoulders of Mark Frost and David Lynch for doing that one goddamn show. The fact that it holds up still to this day is pretty remarkable, too. People forget just how much a show like even The Sopranos owed to Twin Peaks, in many ways - I'd almost bet money that it was pitched as "The Godfather series meets Twin Peaks" or something very similar in at least 1 significant meeting. kaworu fucked around with this message at 02:31 on Dec 8, 2018 |
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Dec 8, 2018 02:21
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The "SOAP WITH A PRIZE INSIDE!" guy who is working with his partner who pretends to be a customer (who claims he got like $5 in his bar of soap!) were real scammers that worked in various towns/camps out west mid-eighteenth century, and they'd just go from town to town for as long as they could get away with overcharging for crappy bars of soap with usually nothing of value in them for a "prize", and as soon as the sheriff caught on they'd just go somewhere new.
kaworu fucked around with this message at 12:48 on Dec 16, 2018 |
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Dec 16, 2018 12:23
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LividLiquid posted:I never watched Dexter. Was it regularly joked about on anything else? Yeah, totally - I remember I was one of the folks who perpetuated that meme, sadly, it was... poo poo, ten years ago here on TV IV that was actually a fairly amusing meme. As I recall it was from Dexter, and it was basically a silly meme from Season 5 or 6 when the show went from "quite good!" (season 4 with Keith Carradine and John Lithgow) to utter crap (season 5 I think with Julia Stiles) extremely quickly. One of the things was Angel or Dexter using "an old PI trick" which was really a farfetched scenario/deus ex machina-type writing and doing a really lovely job of trying to hang a lampshade on it, so "old PI trick" became shorthand for any example of incredibly lazy writing
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Jan 3, 2019 10:33
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I never, ever forgave The Walking Dead for being the reason behind the cancellation of Rubicon, this fantastic show about how the US intelligence community actually works and sort of like a cross between "Three Days of the Condor" and something like "Homeland", though I always felt like Homeland was a lot like Rubicon with gratuitous action scenes thrown in to keep the masses happy. Anyway, Rubicon basically got cancelled because they wanted to spend more money on the Walking Dead which was much more successful and high-budget and launched that same year. I thought that The Walking Dead was shallow, overrated crap which was made to cash in on the craze going on with zombies and post-apocalyptic stuff at the time, and I feel like my overall opinion of the show has essentially been vindicated even if it was fun to watch at the beginning for a while (and I admit it was, in a "bad Stephen King novel" kinda way).
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Feb 22, 2019 06:08
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Bloodbath posted:Rubicon was freaking awesome I rewatch it all the time It truly was. It even had great character actor/playwright/director Michael Cristopher as this shadowy (yet obvious) and intimidating (yet disarmingly polite and honest) villain/anti-villain with the FABULOUS name of "Truxton Spangler". God, what a name. And James Badge Dale was surprisingly ideal in the lead for that show. But the real standout had to be longtime character actor Arliss Howard doing a badass turn as Kale Ingram, a sort of "jack of all trades" within the murky interior of US intelligence contractors. You know, it's kinda funny - the show itself was all about overarching conspiracies and shadowy stuff that kinda borders on the "Deep State" conspiracy theories (but doesn't really go there, thank god). But at the time, that sort of thinking wasn't totally associated with the extreme right wing at the time... You had a ton of radicals/weirdos who identified as "leftist" and believed in the same kind of stuff, except as it applies to 9/11 complicity and war profiteering from private contractors during the '00s under Bush. People forget that. It's funny how it all seems to depend on whether a dem or republican is in the executive. Anyway, a part of me felt like the show was squelched by some conspiracy because it was hitting to close to home about how slapdash and shadowy and opaque the whole process is. Not to mention the existence of these massive private intelligence contractors out there, which most people don't know exist (including trump as well, sadly)
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Feb 22, 2019 18:28
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You know, I don't think I've ever actually heard him speak in an interview where he really let his natural accent hang out like that. Even when he's playing a British character, I'm fairly sure he doesn't usually sound like that. I mean, he could be playing an old fella from the North, I guess? I only know enough about British regional dialects to say that he's definitely speaking in SOME kind of Northern English accent. I feel like I must have seen him do interviews in America, but again, I think he may use his "American" speaking in voice when doing publicity for American Gods or something? Maybe I'm totally wrong and I've somehow just never seen him interviewed.
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Mar 23, 2019 07:03
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davidspackage posted:I always thought it was weird that Ellsworth tells Swearengen "that limey accent of yours" in episode 1, because he sounds 100% American to me. I always thought that like, the "slightly British" accent he uses in Deadwood was probably a better indication of how fairly well educated Americans who grew up in cities (Swearengen was from Chicago unless I'm mistaken) probably sounded a bit like at the time - a hint of something like Received Pronunciation from school most likely, but an accent that's fairly close to standard Midwestern American English today, at least in Al's case.. Whereas a fella like Ellsworth or most of the Deadwood denizens would have mongrel regional accents from all sorts of places. This is pretty consistent, too - educated politicians (Commisioner Jarry for example) as well as, say, Geologists (Francis Wolcott) spoke with a more measured and "British" sounding voice despite being American through-and-through, but in truth I'm fairly sure it was just the way that any proper gentleman who went through schooling spoke at that time, whether they were British or American.
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Mar 23, 2019 11:56
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pyrotek posted:https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/27/david-milchs-third-act That's quite an upsetting article to read, but very good. It all reminds me a bit of Flowers for Algernon, too - I remember I read that story when I was maybe 10 or 11 in some short story/novella anthology, and it was the first thing I'd ever read that truly made me weep. It's a frightening and terribly upsetting thing - the prospect of losing self-awareness. I actually... Well, I can't speak for everyone with mental illness, just myself. I've always felt I had a lot in common with Milch (even though I'm nowhere near as smart) I've also struggled with addiction and mental illness while distinguishing myself academically - but it's always been an uphill fight, for obvious reasons, and I've been lucky to have the support of my family and very kind friends who've helped me to be much more functional and engaged with the world. The point I want to make that's so frustrating is that through my issues with anxiety and PTSD, I always maintained a rational and objective part of my brain that entirely understood how and why I was behaving irrationally, or what the correct thing to do was, or why it was irrational to hide in my room and be afraid for no rational conscious meaning. But knowing that I wasn't behaving like someone who is mentally healthy, or knowing that my response to stress (total avoidance) was unhealthy and only exacerbated my problems really doesn't help. It's more torturous than anything else. I'm also perpetually aware that I might be losing my mind at any given moment - the part that's able to rationally comprehend my mental illness, at least. Because as awful as it is to watch myself behaving in horrible ways, I'm far more afraid of losing my sense of self-awareness and ability to think and talk and write about the things I'm going through. Well, I just wanted to speak on feeling that way. Milch's creative process sounds fantastic though I wanna borrow it.
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May 22, 2019 16:04
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I like to imagine that Cy would have fully given himself over to The Good Lord Jesus in some evangelistic way as a method to scam people. I could see him getting into the preaching business and passing around the basket and making a living off of that corruptly. Actually, if Andy Cramed is coming back (and I don't know if he is) that would probably be a better way for him to wind up... I also wanted to add that I also *truly* love the Finale of Season 2 - "Boy the Earth Speaks To." Arguably the single greatest hour of television ever produced, in my opinion. It's right up there with Episode 8 of Lynch's reboot of Twin Peaks "Gotta Light?", or the episode "Ozymandias" from Breaking Bad, or the season 3 finale of Battlestar Galactica. or the Season 3 finale of Lost.... And so on. Off the top of my head those are probably the top 5 best hours of television I've had the pleasure to watch in the last twenty years. Which I think is best changes on the season or the year or my mood, but usually I'd probably say it's the Deadwood episode. It's the only one that has no reliance on surprise plot twists, or enticing mythology that's been painstakingly set up over dozens of prior episodes. No special effects, no "tricks", no big surprises that could be spoiled. Almost every other episode would have reduced enjoyment if you knew what was going to happen ahead of time, but not so with "Boy the Earth Speaks to". Nearly everything that happens is... inevitable, basically. From Deadwood becoming going from a lawless camp to an actual town with "goddamn laws and everything" officially, to the wedding, to Hearst's arrival and Wu's rivalry coming to a head, to Wolcott's suicide... There's something just extremely satisfying about seeing all the threads of the episode coming together and being woven up and finished. It's like... the first two seasons of Deadwood are slowly going about methodically weaving together this complex tapestry, and all the way to the end of Season 2 it's a tight-wire act that could collapse into a pile of thread or look all screwed up at the end. But instead it just all comes together and fits perfectly. It's funny, though, every time I realize how utterly amazing the finale is I get more annoyed at HBO for renewing it for two more seasons and then reneging on the second one. It's just like, we got this really perfect and totally complete story being told through the first 2 seasons, and that finale would have easily been the best *series* finale ever. And I do like the end of season 3, but... The "end" of season 3 is more like a scene and a line and was meant to continue onwards from there, whereas Season 2 spent an entire episode wrapping things up in the neatest and prettiest bow ever. Season's 3's ending just acknowledges that we *should've* gotten something pretty...
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May 29, 2019 13:23
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:What are your thoughts on the last two episodes of The Shield? Oh man, you know, The Shield is like the one show out of the trifecta of series exploring the pride of, as well as the boiling inner depression/rage - two sides of the same coin - of white heterosexual American men- Sopranos/Shield/Breaking Bad is the trifecta of those shows from that era, and I feel pretty confident saying that even though I've yet to see The Shield. Back then, I avoided it because it seemed at the outset to be something more like pulp exploitation with copious gore and no substance. Of course, that's not what the show ever was even from the very start, it's just how they initially advertised it. My thinking at the time was, "dirty cops make my loving blood boil" having recently watched the Paradise Lost trilogy on the West Memphis kids - this was WAY back like 15 years ago. I was one of few fans of The Wire while it was actually airing, too (well starting with season 2, anyway) and at the time I felt like... The Shield must somehow be diametrically opposed to a show like The Wire, since it's main character was an openly corrupt cop, and I felt very political about stupidly uninformed yet opinionated... I know I ought to give it a chance, the Shield, but... I dunno, it's a tough show for me to go out of my way to watch, I don't even know where to stream it. OK! To get back to Deadwood, I really want to echo the comments about how good Farnum is. I know it's been said before on these forums, but Farnum (and Richardson) have always struck me as extremely Shakespearean-style characters, in the most wonderful way. Their scenes remind me a great deal of the blisteringly funny scenes Shakespeare would write for minor characters - even in tragedies and histories. Not even minor characters necessarily - take someone like John Falstaff in Henry IV part 1, it always seemed to me like Farnum had some of that character's insolence and wit, perhaps? Its the utterly amazing, the way he does those soliloquies (often with Richardson as a prop) while cleaning up bloodstains or reflecting upon some particular future or past perceived slight or humiliation. It is... very tough to create a character like Farnum, who is both beloved and utterly repugnant to both the fictional town and the viewers alike, no doubt. And yet, it is almost extremely appropriate and fitting that all the hard work Sanderson went into perfecting and playing that character would never get any real significant or special attention, and despite having a major role and about as much screentime as any other character, he knows he will never, ever make it to being third billed, forget about second billed, in a major film or TV show... And that probably most of the reasonably intelligent and media-savvy people watching Deadwood likely didn't even remember the actor's name, if they made note of it in the first place. It's gotta be VERY tough being a character actor. I honestly believe that Brad Dourif has been the greatest character actor in American film/television over the past *35-40 years*. I really defy anyone to name anyone else who has had such a prolific and memorable amount of roles from about ~1980 through to today, without EVER really being the lead actor except maybe in a select few incidences I don't know about or cannot remember. I'm very glad he's coming back, because frankly I think the relationship and characters that I really emotionally responded to from the start were Doc Cochran and Jane - both essentially decent and moral humans who could never really have it in them to harm others, barely hanging on in a world where they have to constantly be something they're not, hiding it behind irrational anger and drug addiction (jane's a 'fuckin drunk' and god only knows how many monkeys Cochran had on his back; my guess is 'a loving lot'. He definitely had *plenty* of bottles of Laudanum for Alma, no matter how many times she consumed or subsequently destroyed them. kaworu fucked around with this message at 17:46 on May 31, 2019 |
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May 31, 2019 15:55
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I am looking forward to watching this so much, but I forgot last night was THE night. I just had my birthday this past week, too, so this is like a FANTASTIC birthday present that's sitting in front of me, waiting to be unwrapped  I just started watching to the point where the main theme is playin' and.... Goddamn, this might be one of the most beautiful things these eyes have ever seen, leastways through the tears Not even 5 minutes in and I've already seen Dan hollerin' to wake up Al, Al and Jewel exhangin' insults, and Doc fuckin' Cochran already makin' an appearance.... and god bless you Brad Dourif, you got the voice and the gait and the slightly cockeyed look and EVERYTHING back so perfectly that it kinda blows my mind! I'mma settle in to watch this now, but I must admit I am expecting.... something of a eulogy of a film. An elegiac sigh that encapsulates all we love about the place and the characters who make that place what it is. I'm kinda hopin' for something like that. I had to pause just now after the first five minutes because it's honestly a little emotionally overwhelming to turn this on and see it all again. Goddamn nostalgia - gets me all weepy and overwrought nearly every time, especially with something like this.
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Jun 1, 2019 13:45
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