Tag Archives: True Detective

TV Review

True Detective 1.7 – “After You’ve Gone”

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This review appeared shortly after the initial premiere of True Detective in early 2014 — slight edits have been made since the original posting.

Matthew McConaughey took home a well-deserved Oscar last night for his work in Dallas Buyers Club, beating out stiff competition in the likes of Christian Bale and Leonardo DiCaprio. While his acceptance speech was, as you would expect, very positive and un-Rustin Cohle, the usual drawling fatalism we’ve come to expect from Sunday Night McConaughey was going down on another channel. True Detective followed the slow-paced “Haunted Houses” with an even slower penultimate episode, and yet it still provided enough story progression that waiting a week to find out what the finale has up its sleeve will be torturous. Spoilers follow for the seventh episode “After You’ve Gone”.

At the end of “Haunted Houses” Cohle and Hart met in 2012 for the first time, having not seen each other for a decade and both looking a little worse for wear. Speculations as to what their ultimate meeting would entail were fueled by the shot of Hart checking his loaded gun, guesses ranging from standoff to a revelation that Cohle or Hart or both or whoever is indeed The Yellow King.

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Featured

The Quiller Memorandum (1966)

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It’s been almost fifty years since The Quiller Memorandum, and spy movies have changed quite a bit in the ensuing half-century. It’s unfair to say they’re better or worse nowadays, especially considering the qualification of “spy movie” can mean anything from Skyfall to Syriana to Agent Cody Banks (though, if we’re talking about the latter, then yes: they’re worse). Even the superhero genre is dabbling in spy-ish flicks, with the espionage thriller Captain America: The Winter Soldier drawing favorable comparisons to Three Days of the Condor; Condor, of course, is a spy movie with a main character who is not in fact a spy, nor is he a suave step-ahead killer fighting for what’s right, nor does he even know what’s going on — this all by way of saying that a great “spy” movie doesn’t even need a spy.

But Peter Quiller is a spy, and a damn good one to boot. He’s good by today’s standards, he’s good by the standards of 1966, and he’s good by the standards of his fellow spies in Memorandum. The film opens with a stark, memorable sequence of a man plodding cautiously down a dark, quiet street. He looks around constantly, fearing that the hidden blade might finally come from the shadows. Cautious, quiet. He enters a phone booth and reaches for the receiver when bam! — he’s shot in the back. Dead.

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TV Review

True Detective 1.6 – “Haunted Houses”

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This review appeared shortly after the initial premiere of True Detective in early 2014 — slight edits have been made since the original posting.

The status quo changes yet again three-fourths of the way through the first season of True Detective, with the sixth episode providing a relatively muted but still provoking turnaround from last week’s guns-blazing action (“The Secret Fate of All Life“). This is the episode that fills in some gaps and gets us from Point A to Point B — so far, Point A has been a hell of a ride, and the final two episodes of the season will hopefully clear the bar that’s been set so very high. Spoilers follow for the sixth episode “Haunted Houses”.

The rift between Hart and Cohle is explored in full, and we delve into the 2002 events that would serve to alienate the two for the next decade. Michelle Monaghan finally gets some time to shine as Maggie when Hart’s ex-wife (in 2012) is brought in for questioning before Detectives Gilbough and Papania, and much of the episode stems from her recollections. Aside from her mere presence in the interrogation room, “Haunted Houses” offers up a fairly predictable feast of leftovers from earlier in the show — Hart reacts violently to everything and somehow gets laid by an attractive woman without even trying while Cohle does police work by himself, drinks by himself, and gets laid by an attractive woman without even trying (okay, that was new). The revelations were predictable mostly in the sense that they were inevitable, and any fears that True Detective is slipping into rote procedural territory can be swept aside — “Haunted Houses” was straightforward, yes, but it managed to clear the stage for the final two episodes.

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TV Review

True Detective 1.5 – “The Secret Fate of All Life”

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This review appeared shortly after the initial premiere of True Detective in early 2014 — slight edits have been made since the original posting.

Anyone who has been watching HBO’s True Detective knows that there’s something not quite right about Detective Rust Cohle. Matthew McConaughey has one of the roles of his life here, and he conveys the darkness inside Rust with brilliant ambiguity — is he a deceitful lawman or a meticulous killer? The fourth episode of the series “Who Goes There” marked the first indication of real evidence of something sinister within Cohle, although viewers have suspected as much since the pilot episode. Sunday night’s episode began, finally, to blow the question wide open — full spoilers follow for the fifth episode “The Secret Fate of All Life”.

“Who Goes There” finished with a tracking shot that quickly took the internet by storm over the past week, and the following episode picked up more or less where that shot left off. Hart and Cohle use the latter’s Iron Crusaders connection to hunt down Reggie Ledoux, meth chemist and prime suspect in the Dora Lange murder, and we finally reach the swamp-set shootout that both men allude to frequently in their case testimonials in 2012. Detectives Gilbough and Papania ask Hart and Cohle to recount this event for what must be the thousandth time since it happened 17 years ago, and Hart confirms that every time he’s told the story he’s told it the same, because “it only went down the one way.”

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News

Film & TV News: May 18

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News

  • The Cannes Film Festival is well under way, and buzz is strong on a lot of the films screened thus far. Yorgos Lanthimos presented The Lobster (Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz), Woody Allen presented Irrational Man (Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Stone) and Stéphane Brizé presented La loi du marché (with Vincent Lindon of La mustache), all of which played favorably. On the other end of the spectrum is Gus Van Sant’s Sea of Trees (Matthew McConaughey, Ken Watanabe), which was met with a sea of boos.
  • Jude Law has joined the tentatively-titled The Young Pope, a speculative HBO series about an American pope. That premise would be only vaguely interesting were it not for the presence of director Paolo Sorrentino, helmer of 2013’s The Great Beauty, as Pope‘s showrunner.
  • David Lynch does another 180° and says the Twin Peaks revival is happening after all. At this point we’ll believe it when we see it, and even then we might not care.

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TV Review

True Detective 1.4 – “Who Goes There”

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This review appeared shortly after the initial premiere of True Detective in early 2014 — slight edits have been made since the original posting.

After a two-week hiatus, True Detective roared back last night with one of the most intense episodes of television you’re likely to find. Major developments in the Dora Lange case in 1995 and a twist in the recounting of that case in 2012 were highlights — but an unbroken, heart-in-your-throat tracking shot of the eruption of a street battle brought the HBO series to a whole new level. Spoilers follow for the fourth episode “Who Goes There”.

When we left Cohle and Hart two weeks ago (read the review here), the fourth hour seemed set up for greatness. A gun battle alluded to during the interviews of 2012, along with the arrival of one Reggie Ledoux, promised both action and developments in the Dora Lange case. Both were needed, as the Lange case had been stewing at a low boil for a few weeks and the closest we’d come to an action sequence was a brief tussle between Cohle and Hart in the locker room. And we did indeed receive both — but what we got wasn’t at all what was expected.

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TV Review

True Detective 1.3 – “The Locked Room”

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This review appeared shortly after the initial premiere of True Detective in early 2014 — slight edits have been made since the original posting.

Horror creeps ever closer in the third hour of True Detective, and Rust Cohle and Martin Hart may not be doing all they can to slow the arrival. After last week’s episode “Seeing Things” revealed more about both characters, the most recent entry in the eight-part season dug still deeper into the good and the bad inside the detectives portrayed by Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson — but mostly the bad. Spoilers follow for the third episode “The Locked Room”.

Not long ago, if you told me the hunky McConaughey and the thick-jawed slacker Harrelson would be in a show together and the latter would be the one involved in a love triangle, I probably wouldn’t have believed you. In a distinct continuation of the character arc presented in the first two episodes, Harrelson’s Hart is far from the family man he pretends to be, and his treatment of the women in his life seems increasingly self-centered. Though he is drunk, the scene where he barges in on his younger lover (Alexandra Daddario) and beats the hell out of the kid she’s with still shows Hart’s penchant for quick violence in much the way Cohle’s sudden flare of brutality with the mechanic in last week’s episode showed a similar capacity. These are men with morals but they are also bad men, inescapably, calling to mind Marlon Brando’s musings as Kurtz near the end of Apocalypse Now, seeking “men who are moral, and at the same time…without feeling…without passion…without judgment…without judgment.”

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TV Review

True Detective 1.2 – “Seeing Things”

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This review appeared shortly after the initial premiere of True Detective in early 2014 — slight edits have been made since the original posting.

After a strong, stimulating pilot episode last week, True Detective returned with a second episode that further steeped us in the characters of Rust Cohle and Martin Hart. Headway is made on the murder investigation, but True Detective continues to emphasize the characters over the plot. Spoilers follow for the second episode “Seeing Things”.

Last week, the 1995 murder of Dora Lange brought State Police Detectives Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and Hart (Woody Harrelson) together for the investigation while their disproportionate attitudes kept them distanced outside of work. A connection was made between the Lange murder and the shady disappearance of the young Fontenot girl years earlier, but other than that very few pieces of the puzzle can be placed by the young detectives. The pilot episode also introduced a part of the story unfolding seventeen years after the Dora Lange murder, and in 2012 Cohle and Hart are seemingly estranged, definitely changed from the men they used to be, but somehow definitely still the same.

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TV Review

True Detective 1.1 – “The Long Bright Dark”

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This review appeared shortly after the initial premiere of True Detective in early 2014 — slight edits have been made since the original posting.

Touch darkness, says the promotional poster for HBO’s latest series True Detective, and darkness touches you back. A tagline like this is all too generic these days, paired with a moody title card or a black-and-white shot of the strong-willed protagonist of a new film or television series. True Detective’s ad campaign has all of that — but one thing to take away from the pilot episode, which aired Sunday night in the US, is that the weighty tagline is rightfully deserved. Spoilers follow for the first episode “The Long Bright Dark”.

Conceived as an anthology series (more on that in a bit), True Detective’s first season stars Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as newly-paired State Police Detectives in backwater Louisiana. The year is 1995, and the detectives are still operating in an awkward alliance as they begin an investigation into a gruesome murder. The victim’s name is Dora Lange, and it’s already clear that her case is a driving element of this season — and yet the vast majority of “The Long Bright Dark” is spent with McConaughey and Harrelson, and it’s also clear that this is a show that will focus on the character above the plot. The tension in the partnership is nothing revelatory for a cop show: McConaughey’s Rust Cohle is the unconventional but brilliant loner, Harrelson’s Martin Hart is the by-the-numbers family man looking to succeed in his position. These parts are acted perfectly, though, and McConaughey especially deserves to ride high on the wave of critical praise he’s received for recent roles such as this.

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News

Film & TV News: April 13

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News

  • Stephen King’s The Dark Tower is getting “fast-tracked” — whatever that means nowadays — at Sony Pictures. The fantasy series has long been rumored for a film adaptation and had Ron Howard attached as director at one point, but now it sounds like it might actually get made.
  • As his latest film Furious 7 continues box office domination, director James Wan is now rumored for DC’s Aquaman film. According to a consortium of critics known as Me, if the DC Cinematic Universe has a more cohesive storyline then they should be able to stray in tone and mood from Zack Snyder’s pout-fests without seeming out-of-place. The more unique the directorial vision, the better.
  • The complete Star Wars saga is now available for the first time in Digital HD, just in time to watch all six movies a dozen more times before The Force Awakens comes out.

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