Monthly Archives: January 2014

True Detective: Places that once had purpose

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From a good piece in Mother Jones on how T Bone Burnett chooses music for True Detective

“This show does not avert its gaze,” Burnett says. “It takes a good, hard look at who we are right now, in a very profound way…I live in Los Angeles, and I recently took a drive through the middle of the country, and I was stunned by what I saw. In places that had once had purpose, all that’s left is a pawnshop, next to a gun shop, next door to a motel, next door to a gas station, with a Walmart right outside of town. There are people working three jobs just to get by and having to take methamphetamines to do it. That’s the middle of the country, and that’s a plague that’s spreading outwards.

I grew up (and live) smack dab in the middle of the country which might be why this series resonates so strongly for me. I remember when those places had purpose and have watched it slowly disappear to be replaced by something real dark.

Cable news audience old and white

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How old is the cable news audience? According to a piece by Frank Rich in New York Magazine, real old. And real white.

With a median viewer age now at 68 according to Nielsen data through mid-January (compared with 60 for MSNBC and CNN, and 62 to 64 for the broadcast networks), Fox is in essence a retirement community.

Two percent of Mitt Romney’s voters were black. According to new Nielsen data, only 1.1 percent of Fox News’s prime-time viewership is (as opposed to 25 percent for MSNBC, 14 percent for CNN, and an average of roughly 12 percent for the three broadcast networks’ evening news programs)

MITT

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“Whatever side your on, see another side.” That’s the tag line for the Netflix documentary MITT, written and directed by Greg Whitely, and it’s a good one. I don’t do reviews but I’ll share a few impressions, in no particular order:

  • Some unresolved daddy stuff going on for Mitt
  • He didn’t really want to be president. He wanted to be elected president
  • There must have been times when the family and/or the campaign said, ‘Stop filming. Please leave the room.”
  • The decision to have no narration was a good one
  • Some of the shots looked like they were from a GoPro strapped to the family pooch. I liked that quality throughout the film
  • Mitt and Anne don’t know any poor people. Sure, they’ve met some in their public life, but they seem incapable of grasping what it would be like to be poor.
  • Karl Rove and Roger Ailes threw up 5 minutes into this film
  • No politician will ever again agree to this kind of access

True Detective

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“Think of the hubris it must take to yank a soul out of non-existence into this meat. To force a life into this thresher. My daughter spared me the sin of being a father.”

Whew. I mean… fuck.ing.whew. Just watched the second episode of True Detective (HBO). It’s too early to compare it to other series, we’ll have to see if it can sustain this level of intensity. I hope so? [Season 1. Season 2 sucked donkey balls]

I found myself thinking of other movie detective partners. Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman in Se7en. Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider in The French Connection. McNulty and Bunk in The Wire. But Matthew McConaughey brings something I haven’t seen in awhile. (Never?) Maybe it’s what Curtis said… the business with the cigarettes? I almost passed out a couple of times, holding my breath, waiting for him to exhale. I also heard echoes of Martin Sheen’s voice-overs from Apocalypse Now.

UPDATE: And how many cigarettes did McConaughey smoke? 40. Someone counted.