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Adding to the praise from everyone else, I liked the first episode a lot. One thing I think is a nice touch is how, in a typical Lovecraft work, you have this menace simmering below his stories. Characters are in old towns or strange mansions or weird islands and you The Reader know some icky poo poo could pop off any second, but worse than that, there's a pervasive Wrongness that just hangs over Lovecraft's worlds. Even if nothing bad happens, the Bad is everywhere and all around you and you're just lucky, not special, if you survive. In the show, that same dread is racial terror. And yeah, a trite way to say it is "The real horror is racism!" but what I like is that the show does the work to go, Yeah actually racism IS a pervasive horror. You never know when a diner is safe, what it means when a passing pedestrian looks at you a beat too long, when a town is deadly after dark... I felt such a grave tension on that road trip and I think it was a great way of marrying horror tropes with political commentary. I'll be interested to see how this stacks up against Watchmen (HBO), just because of the shared trope of "existing work recontextualized to feature prominent Black themes". I thought Watchmen did a pretty good job (with some flubs and choices I wouldn't have made here and there) but I have high hopes LC will go a little harder.
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Aug 18, 2020 14:22
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 08:48 |
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Really liked episode 2 and I really love the weird musical cues because they feel significant. I'd never heard Whitey's On The Moon before but it playing as they rush through the climax of an occult summoning ritual that kills all the racist wizards really made me think about why that choice was made. It's just such an interesting thing to do because it feels like a bizarre choice. I think I'm really open to everything the showing is throwing at me because I realized after the opening to episode 1 that this isn't a spook-em-up horror series, it's a pulp adventure. It's Lovecraftian for sure, but it's also evoking a lot of the lesser-known Lovecraft (& friends) romps where something weird just kind of happens for 10 pages and that's that. Like others have said, the end of E2 felt like it could have been a season finale so I am desperately curious to see where this goes. It's just so weird and audacious and confident... I'm hooked!
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Aug 26, 2020 16:22
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drat, I feel like the show really hit its stride here. That was a great episode with some buckwild stuff happening. Regarding (supernatural element spoiler)the baby-headed ghost I found it really creepy in a pulpy kinda way. Like, it's just dissonant and gross and weird. I think that's what I like best about the show, everything just feels very weird and audacious at times. They swing hard at every pitch and while they may whiff every once in awhile, I just love the energy.
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Sep 1, 2020 15:22
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As a white guy, I'm not going to get to far over my skies on the topic of depicting hate crimes in media, but I've really been enjoying these Lovecraft Country reviews by B-Stuc (a comedian) and Michael Harriot (writer for the Root). One reason I like it is that they recognize subtle nods and era/area-specific contexts that are completely lost on me at first, about fashion and Black cultural references and the like. On this topic, they actually found it really interesting that Leti's "interview" in the back of the paddy wagon was how Freddie Gray was killed, noting that it was a historical way of police assaulting Black people out of public view. They didn't seem to find it to be "torture porn" but rather a stamp of authentic Black history. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taq8G0zM2xc
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Sep 2, 2020 17:06
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Sleeveless posted:Big ol' yikes to that. Why is that a yikes? Like, that's... the story.
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Sep 3, 2020 04:33
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AFewBricksShy posted:
The full ouija sentence was "George is Dead" so I think it was the ghost of Epstein loving with them
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Sep 3, 2020 14:23
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AtraMorS posted:I'm rewatching and just got to that scene, and he tosses the sissy line off like he's barely interested in what dude is saying. There's some performative masculinity there, but it's hardly enough to assume it's what Tic really thinks. I'll do you one better: as a queer guy, I've been picking up on weird blips that Tic might be queer, so I actually read "... ... ... ...I'm not a sissy!" as Tic being extra huffy because he's not straight.
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Sep 8, 2020 02:35
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Michael Harriot with a great article on some of the historical references in Lovecraft Country - https://www.theroot.com/where-white-people-are-scarier-than-monsters-the-hidde-1845000536
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Sep 10, 2020 14:31
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drat, episode 5 was awesome. Just weird and gross with great body horror but also, I was genuinely moved by Montrose at the drag show. I found that really lovely and , at least for this episode, I'm glad we didn't fall back on the trope of a self-loathing closeted queer beating the poo poo out of someone they are in love with. Beyond the sexy character stuff, I'm extremely curious as to what this is all leading towards. Also, can we get a moratorium on people complaining about the soundtrack? Yes, it's on the nose, yes, that's a choice, it should be obvious by now this is what the show is so like... let's move on. At this point it's like complaining there's too much mobster drama in the Sopranos. One actually pertinent criticism I have though is the climax of the Davenport saga: I felt like they played the rape of a male for "poetic justice" which, yeah the guy is a racist creep and probably a rapist himself, but rape as justice doesn't sit well with me. Unless we're not meant to think she was sodomizing the manager with a shoe, but that's how I parsed it. That Dang Dad fucked around with this message at 04:45 on Sep 15, 2020 |
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Sep 15, 2020 04:34
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I have really loved the last three episodes. It's a messy show but I love the messiness. I was really moved by Montrose's struggle with and (for a time) acceptance of his queer self. I was equally moved by Tic and Ji-Ah's tortured romance, trying to feel less like monsters. And man did I love the fantastical journey of Hippolyta. It's one of those things where I knew vaguely of some of the references but I was really enraptured by the feeling that what I was seeing was meaningful to people very different from me (with very different experiences). I was intoxicated by the strange visuals and how they were interwoven with really moving character moments. This show swings hard at every pitch; it doesn't always connect, but I just love seeing all the strange places it goes.
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Sep 29, 2020 03:54
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Found out today that the Black lady on the motorcycle that waved to Hippolyta was a reference to a real woman, Bessie Stringfield, a Black woman who rode her motorcycle through all 48 contiguous states (and crossed the US eight times working for the Army as a courier). Thematically appropriate for the show, apparently Bessie "reimagined" her life a few times, claiming different birthplaces and whatnot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bessie_Stringfield
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Oct 1, 2020 14:56
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I have been loving this show for it's camp and weird horror and fearless willingness to just be messy but lately I've noticed something else: I've been really emotionally moved for the last few episodes. Tic dealing with Montrose and Montrose dealing with his queerness (and gradually coming to sort of kind of accept queer love) was really powerful to me. And now with Episode 9, watching Tulsa burn, I felt a microdose of that fear and rage and sadness Montrose and his community must have felt. Seeing it happen "live" just profoundly disturbed me and watching Montrose watch the carnage (or Leti watch the grandma) just really moved me. I didn't expect a show like this would make me tear up so much!
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Oct 13, 2020 15:06
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 08:48 |
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I have really loved the show all the way through so all I needed was for the end not to completely poo poo the bed, and I'm happy to say the ending worked for me. I agree it was a little rushed and a little all over the place, but I was still really moved by it. The show as a whole is for sure messy, but that's what I like about it. It kept me off kilter the entire way through and that really opened me up to learning and thinking about things in new ways. The word I keep using about the show is "audacious". Some shows I respect more than I like, but this one I equally enjoyed it AND respected what it was doing.
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Oct 20, 2020 14:58
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