Showing posts with label True Detective. Show all posts
Just like Rust never sleeps, McConaughey is wide awake
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| Matthew McConaughey as Rust Cohle in "True Detective" on HBO. (Lacey Terrell, HBO)Dad, what
if there's a tsunami?
Not long after the recent spate of earthquakes that rumbled
through Los Angeles and the tsunami that struck the coast of Chile, Matthew
McConaughey's 5-year-old son, Levi, wanted to know what they would do should a
giant wave hit the Pacific Coast. McConaughey, a man rarely without a plan,
told him they would light out of their Malibu home quick, grabbing the dog and
anything else alive, along with the valuables. "That means we get your
Oscar, right?" Levi asked.
"My son ... he's so protective," McConaughey says,
smiling.
It has been nearly three months since
McConaughey won the Academy Award — and just about every other acting honor — for
his lead turn in "Dallas Buyers Club," and the 44-year-old actor has
spent that time reading scripts ("Got more to read right
now, as you would suppose," he says, drawing out the vowels when he says
"read," as he likes to do when he's adding emphasis to a word),
meeting a lot of directors who, for obvious reasons, have taken a sudden
interest in working with him and hanging with wife Camila Alves and their three
kids.
"Livin' without the g," McConaughey
says, taking a swig from a container of green tea he brought with him.
"We're still in the verb. Definitely. I just want to keep flyin'. Yeah.
It's all approach. It's not a destination. It's all in approach. Best I can
figure, you know."
If this sounds a little West Coast chill, it
belies the pragmatic, wide-awake focus that McConaughey has applied to his
career in recent years, leading to the remarkable run of roles that continued
even after "Dallas Buyers Club," with his tone-setting cameo in
Martin Scorsese's "The Wolf of Wall Street" and his lead turn
opposite Woody Harrelson in HBO's metaphysical murder mystery, "True
Detective." The latter became the year's most-discussed TV show, a program
that seemed engineered to create obsessive behavior and vigilant viewing in the
way it wove literary allusions and philosophical musings into its unsettling
puzzle of a story.
McConaughey
watched "True Detective" like the rest of its 11 million viewers —
tuning into HBO on Sunday night, usually after a family dinner and putting the
kids to bed. (He did miss one Sunday, thanks to the Oscars.) Sometimes he'd
watch the episode again immediately after it ended. He always cued it up again on Monday, maybe even
Tuesday. And sometimes for fun he'd investigate the crazy fan theories that
exploded about the identity of the serial killer the show's detectives were
chasing.
"I pretty much went for the ride with it," McConaughey
says. "I had all eight episodes on DVD. But I wanted the pleasure of
watching it and discovering again and — this was my favorite thing about it —
finding out what the hell happened to those guys in the 17 years from when you
first meet them."
At the
outset, "True Detective" toggled between 1995 and 2012, moving from
the moment detectives Rust Cohle (McConaughey) and Marty Hart (Harrelson)
discover a dead woman, posed in a field wearing a crown of antlers, to the
present day when the men are being interviewed about the case separately,
supposedly because the files had been destroyed in a hurricane. Cohle is stoic
and intense, not built for small talk, a man who doesn't try to win an
argument, mostly because he knows he's right, so debate is pointless. "I
consider myself a realist," Cohle tells Hart shortly after meeting,
"but in philosophical terms, I'm what's called a pessimist."
"To pull Cohle off, it's not attitude," McConaughey
says. "Cynicism is a bit of an attitude. You can poke a hole in anything
and rub your nose in it and say, 'That sucks.' This guy is just telling this
flat truth. And the words were so damn good, I just had to trust them and
believe every one of them and not add a lot of lagniappe, a lot of et
cetera."
The
contrast between '95 Cohle (wiry and pragmatic) and 2012 Cohle (wasted,
pony-tailed, his brilliance intact, though he's much more leisurely in revealing it) provided the
show much of its dramatic tension, and the character's nihilistic reveries
("If the only thing keeping a person decent is the expectation of divine
reward, then, brother, that person is a piece of ...") won him a devoted
following among pessimists and realists alike. McConaughey dug him too.
("I'd hate to be in that guy's head, but he's kinda right, you
know?")
"Casting Cohle, a lot of actors that got pitched to me were
much more obviously cerebral, actors you'd expect to play chess players or
scientists," says "True Detective" creator Nic Pizzolatto. To
circumvent these preconceptions, Pizzolatto initially offered McConaughey the
role of Hart, knowing full well he'd want to play Cohle instead. "Which he
did," Pizzolatto says. "And then nobody could really object to
that."
The 2012 interrogation scenes, during which Cohle goes through a case of Lone
Star and then fashions an army of beer can men with the empties, comprised 17
different speeches and stories, a maze of monologues and Never Never Land
trippiness that McConaughey calls "by far the biggest beast I've ever
tackled." It was all filmed, straight through, over a long day and a half.
"First day, I remember we got through 25 pages and there
were two stories to go, and it was already way late," McConaughey says.
"And they said, 'OK, I think we can call it.' And I was sweatin', deep
into it. And I said, 'No, no, no. We gotta stay here.' And we finished those
two off, and as soon as we did, we popped a Lone Star right there and said
'cheers' to that."
As for those celebrated beer-can figures, McConaughey defers to
the show's production design team. He had to focus his attention elsewhere —
which isn't to say he's not open to the pursuit of arts and crafts.
"I'm a great chime maker," he says. "Wind chimes,
man. That's my thing."
|
www.latimes.com
True Detective Season Finale Review: The World Needs Good Men
Going into "Form and Void," there were a lot of ways to describe the first season of True Detective: stunning, raw, philosophical, frightening, pretentious, ambitious, boobies, occasionally hilarious, gorgeous, and incomplete. And coming out of the finale, nothing really changed about those adjectives. "Form and Void" was a very good but not great ending to one of the better new shows to come around in a long time, but I can't help but think the show peaked around Episode 5—the mind-bending and perfect "The Secret Life of All Fate" that threatened to be the first major step in a new post-Golden Age of television renaissance—and since then has been merely a great detective show. That's probably not fair to True Detective to approach it in that manner, but I mean it when I say "great television show." True Detective was astounding television, even when it shifted away from what I thought was its strengths.
For me, it's impossible to look at "Form and Void" individually as an hour. True Detectivewas this idea of "event television" that other networks are chasing. It was eight episodes of a new property that made its viewers theorize and dive in headfirst into an empty pool of obsession. "Form and Void" was the end of a really long movie to me because Season 1 was self-contained with a beginning, middle, end, and no chance of more, unlike 22-or-even-13-episode seasons that contain filler and cliffhangers and could live on in syndication for your grand kids.
And because it was the end of the story rather than a regular season finale, I found it incredibly satisfying as an endpoint even if it wasn't the best part of the season. It ended about as perfectly as it could end. Hart and Cohle got their man in Erroll Childress, a man whose hygiene and sex life was just as frightening as his remorseless acts of murder, but they didn't bust up the bigger sex-cult child-pornography old man's club that was certainly connected to the Tuttle family and responsible for all these missing girls. True Detective was never a happy show, it focused on the worst of us in the worst of times. It's consistent with the show's theme that Hart and Cohle only put a Band-Aid on Louisiana's gusher of a declining young woman population, and realized they they "didn't get 'em all," and weren't going to get them all. But they did get the monster at the end of their nightmare, and the series portrayed this as a realistic victory.
For the viewer who demands closure, this probably didn't work. The idea that Billy Lee Tuttle is still out there and pulling up a van with no windows next to a schoolgirl right now is unsettling, but that's the point. True Detective wants you to leave Season 1 feeling that this battle between light and dark, good and evil, the Rust Cohles of the universe and the fat, incestuous Erolls of the universe isn't done because True Detectiveisn't afraid to show the harsh truth of the world. The paradox of the world needing bad men ("The world needs bad men," came straight from Rust's mouth early in the season) in order to have good men was all over True Detective, and watching those lines get reluctantly drawn is what really made the arcs of Hart and Cohle so interesting.
But it was the final minutes of "Form and Void" that saw those lines firmly etched into the ground. Our two men were still recovering from their battle wounds in the hospital when True Detective delivered an oddball of a twist ending that I don't think anyone expected. Rust Cohle went sentimental on us! Cohle's near-death experience had a profound effect on his psyche, and as Cohle sat in his wheelchair looking like he just got out of a meat grinder, he told Marty that he was looking at his night-sky metaphor (light vs. dark) all wrong. "Once there was only dark," he said, peering up at the faint stars. "If you ask me, the light's winning." Rust Cohle, the man who could look at a puppy and only see a trip to the vet to put the dog down in 12 years, had hope. HOPE! Cohle's words were captured on the season's final shot, a long hold on the night sky as stars shone brighter and brighter. It was almost enough to draw a tear. Almost.
I'm not entirely sure that ending worked, but I give True Detective an A-plus for effort and I loved how it broke expectations. When I think about how I will remember Rust Cohle, one of television's best characters of all time, it will be the man who amassed a beer-can-man army as his minions against his interrogators. It will be the man who spoke of flat circles, bad men, and suicide suggestions. His final revelation of hope will be a footnote in my memory even though it shouldn't be, and I'm not sure if it's because I'm enamored with the Rust Cohle of old (1995 and 2002, specifically) or if it's because I want True Detective to be that dark, Nihilistic show that thrilled me through the first five or six episodes. And maybe it's because I'm not entirely sure I even believe him. It could be the pain meds talking for all I know. It's just an abrupt turn to take everything we knew about a man—Rust was defined by that fatalistic attitude—and spin it on its head in a series' final minute. But gosh darnit, it still warmed my heart even if it was sudden and cheesy. I like to think Cohle took that positive attitude straight to the nearest watering hole and put down a celebratory six pack of Lone Star.
The ending may give us a little insight as to what's coming in future seasons. I'm just guessing here, but what if future seasons of True Detective all existed in the same universe, and really, there's no reason they couldn't, and told similar stories of how the job affected people in different ways? Did you ever read Cloud Atlas (ignore the movie, it's awful)? It's one of my favorite books, and I think True Detective could do something similar with its structure as it moves forward. Cloud Atlas takes place over several different time periods with recurring themes and images popping up in several short stories. It would make sense that Season 1 of True Detective, which focused more on existential themes rather than homicide investigations, would carry over similar ideas into Season 2's brand-new setting and characters. Cohle's last-minute ray of sunshine could just be the beginning of this war between light and dark. I'm not saying that every season will end with a formerly disenchanted detective saying, "If you ask me, the light's winning," but I could easily imagine it ending with another small victory. "We ain't gonna get them all, that ain't what kind of world it is, but we got ours," Marty said. Maybe True Detective really is a show about good prevailing over evil, about believing that the world isn't one huge garbage dump rotting away at the core, about understanding that you can only do your part to help the light. Maybe, when True Detective Season 14 ends and Zac Efron shares a sunrise with Ashton Kutcher, we'll see True Detective for what it really was: a show about changing your outlook for the better. That's the only way I can understand Cohle's sudden reversal of perspective fitting in with the rest of the series. (That, or another main character has the exact opposite trajectory as Cohle's and the two meet in a later season as a superhero and supervillain and we realize Season 1 was just preamble to a Captain Cohle summer blockbuster movie franchise.)
But I still call "Form and Void" "good but not great" because it didn't quite match up with the meaty and mysterious middle of Season 1, which I thought (and prayed) True Detective would take all the way to the end. Episodes 3, 4, and 5 were revelatory television that played with narrative structure, time, and character. Earlier in Season 1 I tweeted out that True Detective had consumed me, but once the interrogations with Gilbough and Papania ended, True Detective burped me up. I loved the idea of not knowing what was the truth, on relying on potentially unreliable narrators, of fitting the puzzle pieces together to figure out what had happened and what made Hart and Cohle who they were in the present. Episodes 7 and 8 shed that mystery so that all we saw was truth. I hate to penalize a show for being so great at one point, but that run of True Detective episodes were SO good that it made the last three hours look somewhat tame by comparison.
And tame is indeed a relative term, for "Form and Void" contained the scariest sequence of the series by far. Cohle's frantic gangland exit at the end of "Who Goes There" remains the season's pièce de résistance, but Cohle and Hart navigating Childress' twig maze was more intense given the uncertainty of it all. And that's what these last two episodes did have over the first six. We didn't know if Hart or Cohle would die because we were in real time. Even as soon as Hart and Cohle pulled up to Childress' hoarder house, the air in the room changed. There's a shot of the car facing us with that little shed in the background, and you just knew something horrible was going on in there. Cohle knew it, too, and immediately told Hart to call Papania for backup because "this is the place." True Detective does so many things so well, but my favorite is it's mastery of suspense and the way it can seamlessly transition into action. "Marty clear the house!" was our starter-gun for a 10-minute sequence of heart-racing in this one, and it was impossible to do anything but inch forward on the couch and be mesmerized by the backwoods labyrinth, the effective use and non-use of sound, and gorgeous cinematography.
I've probably changed my mind on "Form and Void" a dozen times since watching it, wavering between various degrees of positivity, but I'm noticing that the more I think about it, the more I like it. Right now, it's very, very good, but tomorrow it could be three "very"s and by the time Season 2 ends, it could be the best ever as it finds another puzzle piece to snap into.
News Source: www.tv.com
Your dream cast for 'True Detective' season two: Meryl Streep, Sandra Bullock, Jack Nicholson ...
Now that the first iteration of HBO's buzzy "True Detective" is a thing of the past, let's play armchair casting director for the second season. Specifically, which A-listers do you want to fill the shoes of Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson?
Remember, "True Detective" is HBO's version of "American Horror Story," an anthology series that will reportedly change its cast, location and story every season. By producing a short eight-episode run, prestigious HBO will be able to convince movies stars of all shapes, sizes and paychecks to join them on the project. (It also doesn't hurt that the show has such incredible potential to win its cast and crew boatloads of Emmys.)
HBO scored Oscar winner McConaughey ("Dallas Buyers Club") and Emmy nominee Harrelson ("Game Change") for the just-concluded first season, but can they top themselves next year?
In Gold Derby's TV forum, I asked for your season two dream cast and you delivered big time with some spectacular out-of-the-box choices. Most of you are in agreement that the next season should focus on a female detective pairing, or even a male-female combo, instead of the same male duo we got in Season One.
Below, just some of your brilliant suggestions:
Opera Junky: I like the idea a contrasting pair... how about Viola Davis as a seasoned detective paired with an agent from INTERPOL to solve a case with international implications. The INTERPOL agent would be played by the sublime Olivia Coleman, who would have been my choice for an Emmy if "Broadchurch" had been eligible in the US.
taloson: On Twitter I saw someone suggest Kyle MacLachlan and Sherilyn Fenn, which would be amazing because it would basically be our only chance at a pseudo-"Twin Peaks" continuation. And assuming they keep the same creepy atmosphere, it would fit even more!
vinny: Aaron Paul and either Bryan Cranston or Kathryn Erbe.
outsider: Helen Mirren and Sandra Bullock, or Robert Downey Jr. and Mark Ruffalo.
Atypical: Time for two women next season. Regina King's my first choice. Pair her up with a veteran actress to counter. Frances McDormand? Sigourney Weaver?
Macbeth: Bruce Dern and Jack Nicholson. Honestly, I'd love to see Lupita Nyong'o paired with someone -- maybe someone like the aforementioned McDormand or Weaver.
Actriz: Helen Mirren and Judi Dench.
Nessie: Jodie Foster and Sandra Bullock, with Jodie in a Rust-like role and Sandra as the Marty character, married with kids and always hitting on hot guys (with much male nudity).
Beau S.: Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, or Meryl Streep and Glenn Close, or Jerry Seinfeld and Jason Alexander.
And of course, I couldn't resist getting in on the fun either. My dream scenario would feature Ian McShane as a grizzled detective ready for retirement and Jennifer Garner as his estranged daughter who gets transferred to his precinct against both of their wishes because of her prior knowledge on the case. The stars of "Deadwood" and "Alias" on screen together for the first time? How could you not watch?!
What is your dream detective duo for Season Two? Sound off in the comments section below and then join the discussion in our TV forum.
News Source: www.goldderby.com
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