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Gonz posted:What we’ve got here is a Dyatlov Pass scenario. yes...ha ha ha....yes! I'm in the crowd that wants maximum weirdness cranked up in my True Detective (Pizzaman robbed us of the occult history of the LA transportation system and that was everyone's loss), so I was willing to overlook a lot to get that good cosmic gumbo of existential horror, hardboiled true detectiving, and sinister conspiracy. There was in fact a lot to overlook, but I'm still game. - I massively appreciate the inciting incident being such a big outlandish swing that even a "rational", grounded explanation is going to have be completely off-the-wall. Hit me with the wackiness, please. - CGI caribou aside, the first ten minutes feel off in every way. The rest of the episode follows the series' usual habit of closely keeping to the detectives' perspective and only giving glimpses outside it, to build up the paranoia, claustrophobia and unreliability of their experience. Too much is immediately and objectively revealed at the scientists' camp (and too much of it, like the shadow-girl running across the corridor, feels generic). - The plotting around the scientists' disappearance in general feels mangled. Shouldn't everyone be urgently organising a search party rather than calmly and methodically going through old case files at this point? - Dissecting The Thing by looking at an all-male group of scientists on the outskirts of a town dominated by female authority figures (and maybe a sullen male resentment underlying it?) feels very promising indeed. Interesting to see where that goes. - Line by line, the writing just isn't as good as it should be, which is particularly odd when there's so much talent available to back Lopez up. (Barry Jenkins was a producer on this?!) S1's hardboiled alternate reality where everyone speaks in ominous portents, philosophical exchanges, pessimistic ramblings and "gently caress you"s would work perfectly for this environment, but for whatever reason we get jokes about Kelis and Spongebob instead. The exchange with Annie's husband - "We're all alone. God, too." - felt like the only scene that really hit the right note for me. - For all the excitement about Foster, Navarro gets by far the most interesting moments of characterisation in this episode; her scene with the bartender was good and memorable. Hope there's more to Danvers than dead kids and unruly living kids. - "Oh, hey, what you drawing there?" followed by the kid's ludicrously scary sketch being held up to camera got a huge and presumably unintended belly laugh from me. On the other hand, I liked the ghostly interpretive dance and the howls from the drunk woman in the cell. Both of those moments felt funny and eerie in the best Twin Peaks way. grobbo fucked around with this message at 16:55 on Jan 15, 2024 |
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Jan 15, 2024 16:50
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With regards to 'she's awake', the spooky drawing lady with a bleeding mouth, and the reference to Alaskan folklore, I'd assume we're going to get some kind of take (even if it's ultimately hallucinogenic or whatevs) on the kushtaka or another indigenous shapeshifter - taking on the form of a woman in distress to lure victims out into the snow to their deaths. Cutting out the tongue might be an attempt to remove the shapeshifter's luring voice.
grobbo fucked around with this message at 17:58 on Jan 15, 2024 |
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Jan 15, 2024 17:54
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Danger posted:How much of that is explained by this originally being some other completely novel script treatment they shoehorned into the True Detective brand? Some, not all. I think the True Detective brand has always been a 'you know it when you see it' oddity based largely on the first season - after all the showrunner himself clearly wanted to get away from the supernatural elements in S2, figured the key ingredients were complicated conspiracies, hardboiled adult themes and stagey dialogue, was understandably mocked for the resulting season, and audiences have never been able to agree since then on exactly how much uncanniness there should ideally be. It's also a show that's had previous success mingling human drama with genre pulp, which can make it hard to unpick what feels suitable and what doesn't What's the difference between the horror cliche of a kid blankly composing scary drawings, the horror cliche of a shivering man with his back to the audience who turns abruptly, and the horror cliches of Errol's Texas Chainsaw Massacre house from Season 1? Buildup and atmospherics, mostly. But even bearing in mind that the treatment was an original concept to begin with, it does feel remarkable that nobody in production stopped to say, 'Wait, this show's first episodes usually have the detective examining the eerie aftermath of something terrible that happened completely offscreen, as opposed to a spooky stinger that shows the victims directly being terrorised, isn't there a reason for that?' To me that smacks of insecurity rather than laziness in adapting the script, though.
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Jan 16, 2024 08:52
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roomtone posted:it was weird but i think it's been made clear we're supposed to suspect/dislike his dad, so maybe more will be revealed on that I think this is it, but the show does also seem to undermine the stakes of the clash by casting John Hawkes and his gentle eyes and then having Danvers run rings around him / crack constant jokes at his expense throughout the episode, which gives the impression that she could just go around to his house and get the boxes herself with zero trouble. grobbo fucked around with this message at 15:58 on Jan 16, 2024 |
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Jan 16, 2024 15:49
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Henchman of Santa posted:https://twitter.com/lingounbound/status/1747495867513544882?s=61&t=N2RxjCcZEoNL3LJNhAQ0dg Weirdly this makes complete sense. This must be how Han Solo feels when he's listening to Chewbacca.
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Jan 17, 2024 18:03
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joepinetree posted:
It also helps to have the reactions from W. Harrelson, who can make you laugh with no more than a tongue-jutting gurning scowl into the middle distance
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Jan 17, 2024 19:12
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Bright Bart posted:TD has a slightly odd way of using female sexual activity for shock value. See also: Hart's daughter in SE01 and Navarro basically assaulting her FWB (I don't know how normal this is I'm not a sex haver) until it kind of makes it okay(?) since he smiles right after in the new season. I understand there's no way it's one dude's fixation since the writers and now even show runners are different, but I've noticed it. I saw that Navarro scene as a very deliberate callback on Lopez' part, although not to Hart's daughter. Cassie's storyline is a strange one in Season 1, and it follows the story's general undecidedness about whether the ultimate horror should be men's power over women or the abuse of children. The villains are both the snakily charismatic last disciples of a once-grand folk religion luring in vulnerable adult women like Dora Lange for sacrifice with the promise of drugs and cosmic meaning, but also dribblingly gross, openly deranged child kidnappers / abusers / killers, and the show tends to switch between the two episode-by-episode. (One thing we just discard by the finale - if Errol's usual MO was to run around grabbing kids in the woods and locking them in a storage container, why and how did he and his clearly unhinged buds go to such diligent lengths to approach the 28-year-old Dora in public at church, take her voluntarily to Carcosa or Ledoux's lab, teach her their faith, and then risk it all by letting her go home again enough times that she could write about it in her diary? Dora, did you not see the piles of children's shoes, for God's sake?) The show pulls an odd bait-and-switch with Hart's daughter between these two themes - first it sets up the possibility that she, too, is a victim of the original cult and she's acting out its sexual violence with her dolls and drawings. Then upon the time advancement, it repositions things so that instead we're looking at Marty's territoriality and controlling tendencies, we're calling back to the theme of men becoming furious when they realise they don't own female sexuality. That takes us into some uneasy and unresolved territory, as with much of S1's commentary on sex and what underlies sex. Is Cassie having sex with two boys at once an adventurous act of sexual expression on her part or is it a compulsive repetition of something horrible she's suffered offscreen? Likewise, how do we feel about the writer's apparently pointed effort to show us that the show's sole queer character was ritually abused by men as a child? In general, S1 is a really interesting, flawed (and I think the flaws are all either very deliberate or organic outcomes of the story it's telling, although that doesn't make them immune to criticism) object when it comes to gender relations. It's deeply scathing about masculinity, but its female characters are all essentially reactive, and express their agency / act out their emotions mainly through having sex with men - for revenge like Maggie, out of gratitude and hero-worship like Beth, Cassie's threesome that might be an act of adventurous self-expression but could also be compulsive repetition of offscreen abuse. Very occasionally they're allowed to have a pithy retort at the male characters' expense as well. There's an early scene where Hart is pestering Alexandra Daddario's character for sex, and he offers her a pair of handcuffs which he intends to make her wear. Instead she meaningfully puts them on him, but the switch doesn't actually lend her any power in the act - the camera still focuses on his delighted face vs her HBO-mandated exposed breasts, and the only thing she seems to want to do with her newfound control is give him a sexy Miranda Rights reading. The Navarro scene, I think, is very clearly referring back to that and tweaking the power dynamic. Navarro is in the same position as Daddario, on top, holding down her partner's arms - but she's wearing a bra while her partner is fully naked, and her rippling muscles are the only physical detail that the camera lingers on. She similarly takes control of the sexual act, but does so in a way that genuinely and forcefully overrides her partner's wants, to the extent of becoming uncomfortable in its own right. It's a good character detail and expression of intent from Lopez, I liked it.
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Jan 18, 2024 10:58
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I always figured Pizzolato was going for more of a David Mamet thing, honestly.
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Jan 18, 2024 13:58
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if we're going to hold Lopez personally responsible for the word '2st' in the background set dressing, then we should also put Christopher Nolan on trial for the word 'HIEST' in Dark Knight Rises, because that poo poo was right in the centre of the screen where he couldn't possibly have missed it, and he has to live with that no matter how many nice suits he wears
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Jan 22, 2024 23:09
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Caught up on Ep 2. - It's a massive departure for the series (and maybe more of a clear continuation of the ideas from Tigers Are Not Afraid), but the mythology of ghosts so far is a lot of fun and provide the most interesting dialogue notes. - John Hawkes feels more and more miscast as time goes on. The character seems like he's meant to be a wounded, prideful jackass in the Marty Hart vein, as a contrast to his son, but Hawkes is much too fragile and sensitive to get that across. - For all the talk of the AI poster, I think there are more obvious signs of a possibly muddled or rushed production. For instance, Peter warning Danvers' daughter to stay away from the corpsicle because she "doesn't want that in her head"...but the body horror is already fully visible in all its detail from where they're standing. (Presumably that was written with the idea that they'd be sitting much further back in the bleachers, or with a sheet over the corpsicle?) - The writing continues to struggle with Ennis' size and how that impacts the plot. It's a small town with limited social spaces where everyone seems to know one another, but this is the first time anyone has any gossip to share about Clark, the eccentric nudist foreign scientist who'd been regularly sneaking out to a trailer in a well-known Ennis hiding-spot to have sex with Annie, who then showed up murdered? Nobody thought to check the Nook after her death? - I'm fine with Travis, but the mention of Tuttle feels off because I thought S1 clearly presented a regional, evangelical family trading on personal connections and corruption rather than a global business entity. - The problem with Danvers so far isn't necessary that she's unlikeable - nearly all of our TD heroes have been assholes - it's that she doesn't have a good foil right now to play against. She needs someone to actually push back against her (which would help to better articulate her flaws in the process), but nobody's providing that other than Navarro, whose jabs at her are completely generic. It's curious that Lopez cited the bickering-in-the-car scenes from Season 1 as a major inspiration when that kind of character work is exactly what we're missing right now. - The scoring is a reminder of what a fantastic job T-Bone Burnett did in S1 and S2 in using music to establish mood and character emotion - right now the needle drops are largely only being used for ironic contrast, and they're undermining the atmosphere rather than helping to build it up. My one prediction is that the sworls on Travis' notebook are pointing towards a pair of hills. I'll say this for the show - for better and worse, it's a genuine curiosity so far.
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Jan 24, 2024 11:49
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Snowmanatee posted:My favourite theory from some random Reddit comment is Danvers is the one catfishing Hank. “Fantasy football” yeah right. oh no, now I really want to see this
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Jan 28, 2024 09:44
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I AM GRANDO posted:Alexandra Daddario appears in an attempt at a backdoor pilot teasing the premise of season five: the return of all the characters whose actors would agree to come back. no, no, no, it was Lili Simmons' character who offered Marty a backdoor pilot.
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Jan 29, 2024 22:52
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DaveKap posted:I will say this, though. There are so many dangling threads right now that I will, at the end of the season, have to give a nod if they manage to believably wrap them all up. The season's in an incredibly difficult spot right now so I can't help but be intrigued. Yeah, whatever happens, I'm excited to see that ending, if only to understand what caused all these critical reactions: BBC: In that last episode, it may be hard to buy what caused the men's vanishing act, an explanation that leaves you thinking, Really? Hollywood Reporter: The story builds to a finale and resolution that I found simultaneously silly and consistent with the messages of the show I’d been watching, though I’m sure it will polarize CNN: The premise ultimately feels a little too out there and “X-Files”-ish for its own good, and while the resolution brings the disparate threads together, it labors to resolve them. EW: Night Country benefits from a second viewing, especially since the “who” in the “whodunnit” will almost certainly come as a surprise. (No spoilers, but the reveal is viscerally satisfying.) That last one is interesting - the silliness and X-Files mentions lead us towards the pathogen theory, but then what villainous reveal on that front could possibly be both hugely surprising and hugely satisfying?
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Jan 30, 2024 14:52
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Despera posted:Even season 1 had an episode where nothing happened (6-7 whichever had the boat) and had less ambition in its final episode than the average x-files episode (ooo scary guy in forest). I dont get where these "near perfection" takes come from. Bludgeoning season 4 with the supposed sanctity of season 1 is something to do I guess. Eh, there are shades of nothing. For instance, this season could do with a good bit more outlandish and absurd nothing like 'here's a ridiculous silent but fearsomely loyal bartender/sniper ally out of nowhere' and a good deal less 'all right, guess it's time to go talk to Qavvik again to laboriously collect another clue'
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Feb 6, 2024 22:18
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John Hawkes has an interesting interview with GQ where he states that the actors essentially workshopped and rewrote the ending of the episode together to make it 'more believable', including making the decision on the day of the shooting that Danvers should be unarmed. It's a completely hacked-about scene in its final state: -Why does Danvers keep telling Peter to 'think! Think!' when there's not really a narrative reason why he *would* shoot his dad dead on the spot and he never seems at risk of siding with Hank? Wouldn't she be better off telling Hank to lower his gun and confess? - For the sake of dramatic tension, shouldn't we see Hank at least try to win his son over to his side? Not even a token bit of 'Danvers is the real murderer, son - you figured out she killed Wheeler, didn't you?' - If Hank, accepting his likely fate, thinks it's worth confessing to the other characters that he didn't kill Annie K, does he maybe want to say who did kill her? - Not even an effort to shoot your dad in the shoulder or something, Peter? - Why is it so important to go to the ice caves now? Why can't it wait until the storm's passed and you've disposed of the body? so you've got to wonder what it was like before. grobbo fucked around with this message at 17:38 on Feb 10, 2024 |
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Feb 10, 2024 17:35
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sethsez posted:The mine sent a guy to kill the person who would lead them through the caves, so something is clearly there and the mine knows that the cops know. The clock is ticking on how long they have before the evidence down there is irretrievable and/or someone comes after them instead. Gotta agree to disagree here. The show has in no way conveyed the idea that the mine is capable of suddenly reaching or sabotaging whatever's in the caves, or that they have additional forces at their disposal and ready to act. In fact, prioritising Navarro's plan and waiting until the bodies are discovered (rather than leaving a grieving and perhaps unreliable Peter alone to deal with it) theoretically puts our heroes in a far stronger position to advance the investigation, since suddenly there's irrefutable evidence that a corrupt cop shot the Ice Caves witness.* *although why Navarro thinks that the body of Otis, shot with Danvers' gun in Hank's car, along with a missing Hank isn't going to just look like Danvers killed them both is completely beyond me. (EDIT: this was wrong, i am a bad watcher of things) grobbo fucked around with this message at 19:08 on Feb 10, 2024 |
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Feb 10, 2024 18:44
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joepinetree posted:My guy, he didn't use Danver's gun. He put Danver's gun behind his back, and then drew the gun from his holster on the right hand side. In an episode where they've just shown that the mine had been bribing the water results despite 9 deaths, blew up the entrance to the caves, and had the higher up chief of police essentially blackmail her to let the death of Annie go, and even sent her direct subordinate to just straight up murder a witness. Fair enough, I rescind that final point in shame. grobbo fucked around with this message at 19:10 on Feb 10, 2024 |
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Feb 10, 2024 19:08
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Call this nitpicking if you like, but if I was the sinister senior employee of a mining corporation, and we'd colluded with local police in order to cover up the murder of an indigenous woman by a group of scientists in order to protect our secret lab where the scientists conducted unethical skulduggery and then all the scientists showed up dead bar one, along with evidence that their deaths were revenge by someone who knew about the indigenous woman's murder and then it transpired that the missing scientist had constructed an eerie obsessive shrine to the dead woman while openly losing his mind after she died and if I could reasonably surmise that the missing scientist was probably hiding out in the secret lab accessible by a convenient entrance in the building owned by my company and if then it became clear that the ongoing manhunt for the missing scientist risked exposing the secret lab so if in other words I had a pretty drat good guess about the exact whereabouts of the unstable man who could, if successfully questioned by the cops, expose the death of Annie K and all of our polluting nefariousness, who was also a perfect patsy due to being himself wanted for murder and if I then chose to call upon my crooked police contact and bribe him to hunt down a man, drag him out into the snow, and execute him to tie up all our loose ends and ensure nobody could talk I probably wouldn't tell him to try and kill a random cave guide, is all I'm saying.
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Feb 19, 2024 17:06
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Hate it when me and my co-workers take the law into our own hands to avenge a forgotten victim failed by an investigation that went nowhere and then some loving centrist ghost instantly shows up and starts handing clues to the cops about the murders we committed. Where were you earlier, you narc?
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Feb 19, 2024 18:58
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Wachter posted:OK so if I have it all correct, the ghost that causes bleeding ears and terrifying visions and rolls oranges and hubcaps at you is the bad ghost. It ate the dreams of the scientists who killed her. Later it possesses the sole survivor of those scientists in order to cruelly taunt the one cop who actually cares about catching her killers. I think the neat thing about the season is that it manages a carefully-crafted balance of ambiguity, so there's also a perfectly rational explanation for all of this - maybe the supernatural is involved, or maybe it's just a regular town filled with constant meaningful hallucinations, nomadic oranges exploring the tundra, and that one spooky wind everyone hears that sounds exactly like "She's awake". It's really up to the viewer to interpret what they've seen.
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Feb 20, 2024 08:52
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GABA ghoul posted:What was even up with that tongue? Did Jean Penn cut it out? Who put it under the table then and why? Are these leftover setups for Night Country S2 that they couldn't manage to remove from the script without huge rewrites in time? From creator interviews: - Hank cut the tongue out to send a warning to Annie's fellow activists - Depending on your interpretation, the tongue was then either stolen and stored away by a local member of the community who then participated in the killing, or it was left there by Annie's vengeful spirit to signify that justice had been done. Why would either party want to leave the tongue under a sandwich table at the research lab instead of out with the bodies? Well, you see, they, uh
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Feb 20, 2024 13:08
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covidstomper58 posted:When that multiple amputee scientist woke up in the hospital and called Navarro by her first name and said her mother says hello and she was waiting for her, I guess that was Annie K possessing his body temporarily, or he was just such a creeper that he knew the names of officials in town and that was just the kind of thing he posted regularly? I think one crucial problem with the supernatural elements is that the show starts by laying out a clear and pretty traditional mission statement early on that there are 1) ghosts who act as spiritual messengers of truth from beyond the grave, 2) ghosts who linger on because they miss us, and 3) ghosts who want to torment us so we join them in death. But then it continually muddies that clarity about the motives and powers of the supernatural forces - partly because we only see the truth-seeking ghosts get involved with the investigation immediately after the victim of the original crime has got justice and not years earlier when it would have been useful, partly because the show flirts with the idea that the ghosts are out to get Navarro but ultimately treats her visions as a pathway to greater self-knowledge, partly because there's this unclear but very involved relationship going on between all these ghosts and the cosmic-horror deity out on the ice which gets its own set of rules, abilities and motives. The possession scene is the crux of all that confusion, because logically it cannot be Annie K or Travis or the ice-goddess or Holden doing the possession; the entity seems to be purely malevolent in the 3) sense and shows no interest in pointing out to Navarro that she's standing in front of Annie K's killer or helping her discover her true name. So is this Wheeler's ghost? Is there another supernatural faction working against our heroes? Does it just not show up ever again? Can the other ghosts possess human bodies on the verge of death or is this just a wasted one-time opportunity?
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Feb 21, 2024 09:42
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