Sunday!
Last weekend, we (finally!) had time to complete the (brilliant!) Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy. The name comes from how Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World’s End all have scenes that focus on Cornetto Ice Cream. Well, The World’s End focuses on a wrapper. That wrapper, however, was enough to give those movies that particular trilogy title instead of something like “the apocalypse trilogy” or something.
Not that Hot Fuzz was an apocalypse, of course.
Anyway, we only recently got around to watching The World’s End and, at first, I didn’t really like it. Well, not “I hated it!” but I thought that it was the weakest of the three films. In this one, instead of playing the stand-up guy in the flick as he did in Shaun and Hot Fuzz (okay, he was a wound a bit tight in Hot Fuzz), Simon Pegg played the jerky guy that you’re friends with anyway. Wait, not even that. Nick Frost in Shaun was the jerky guy that you’re friends with anyway. In this one, he plays the jerky guy that you were friends with anyway back in high school and have since moved the heck on from. The one who you spent every other day with in high school but is the main reason you’re not going to go back to the reunion. Because you just *KNOW* that he’s going back to the reunion. He’s the guy who looks forward to the reunion.
Anyway, I didn’t really enjoy spending two hours with that guy.
With that said, Glyph points out Film Crit Hulk’s take on the movie and Hulk points out how the movie is exceptionally complex, is more than willing to explore some deep, dark themes, and doesn’t merely have a Chekov’s Gun, but has a Chekov’s Gun Store.
I still didn’t really enjoy spending two hours with that guy.
Don’t get me wrong, I thought the movie was very, very good and I am glad that I saw it but after seeing Shaun of the Dead, I did my best to make sure my friends who hadn’t seen it went out and saw it. After Hot Fuzz, I did the same. After The World’s End… I’m just acknowledging that it was very, very good and, if you’ve seen the other two, you should see this one. I probably won’t see it a second time, though.
Tonight is also The Royal Rumble. (In most years, I would have put an exclamation point at the end of the sentence.)
(Also, didn’t they used to have the Rumble on the last Sunday Night before the Superbowl that didn’t have football? What’s Up With That?)
Anyway, here’s what’s currently scheduled for the Rumble:
Dean Ambrose vs. Kevin Owens for the Intercontinental Belt in a Last Man Standing match.
This one should be a corker. I love both of these guys and look forward to their brawl… I kind of would rather they had a straight up, no gimmick, match that the folks in the back said “you’ve got 24 minutes, make us proud” than something like a Last Man Standing match (where they’ll say “you’ve got 14 minutes, knock yourselves out”), but you can’t have everything. I’m hoping that the match will end with something like Owens lowering a forklift or something on Ambrose and we see Ambrose flailing to get up but he just can’t because the forklift “MUST WEIGH A TON!” and we have Owens win, Ambrose lose (BUT STILL LOOK GOOD), and we’re set up for an awesome IC match at WrestleMania.
Alberto Del Rio (c) vs. Kalisto
This should be very good and, if the back office is smart, it’ll be an opportunity to expose the fans to a Asistencia Asesoría y Administración style. The back office is not smart. The back office is dumb.
These guys are both skilled wrestlers, though. It should be a good match anyway.
Charlotte vs. Becky Lynch
Sigh. They need to get rid of the “Diva’s” title and go back to the “Women’s” title. They actually have women wrestlers who are not divas now. I guess that stuff like Total Divas is more important to them than the stuff that happens in the ring. I don’t see how it creates synergies, though… how many tickets to house shows are sold by Total Divas? How many PPV buys? How many subscriptions to WWE.com? How many t-shirts? I just don’t understand anything anymore.
It’s like the back office is embarrassed by Professional Wrestling.
The New Day vs. The Usos
I love the New Day. I have gone from chanting “New Day Sucks” to “New Day Rocks”. The Usos haven’t ever really clicked for me. I love the Haka, I know they pour their hearts and souls into their matches… but they’ve never really clicked for me. They provide a great foil for New Day, though. They’ve got *THAT* going on for them.
And, finally, THE RUMBLE ITSELF.
Again, I would have put an exclamation point after that sentence but, you know, Reigns.
The Rumble is usually one of the most fun PPVs of the year and it’s usually got a good shot at being the best one. They can pack a half dozen (or more) storylines into a decent Rumble and the best ones (e.g., 2001) have an ebb and flow of chaos, comedy, and end with edge-of-your-seat screaming at the television. (Poor Kane.)
Anyway, this year’s has a cinderblock chained to its ankle. The WWE has decided that we are going to like Roman Reigns, like it or not. And we’re going to cheer for him, like it or not. And we are going to see him as someone who has earned his spot rather than as someone who was picked by the back office to be champion, like it or not. And so, like it or not, the Royal Rumble isn’t going to decide the #1 Contender for the match at WrestleMania. Like it or not, the Rumble will be a title defense for the #1 Entrant: Roman Reigns.
Personally, I think he’d benefit from a year with the IC belt and establishing himself as a serious guy at a lower level. This being pushed to the moon just ain’t working. (I’m going to boo the heck out of him, I tell you what.)
So we’re stuck with the horns of a dilemma. Either Roman Reigns is the #1 entrant and wins (forget about being pushed to the moon, we’re talking about being pushed to Mars) or he’s eliminated and loses the belt in a seriously unsatisfying way.
My picks for interesting storylines told in the match: The Wyatt Family will set something up for a feud with someone (or a couple of someones) for a longish term storyline (Big Show, maybe? Big Show and Braun Strowman would look good standing across from each other… good enough to sell PPVs around the thought of them doing so). Stardust will be the “less than 10 seconds in the Rumble” comedy spot. Poor Stardust. Braun Strowman will get the Diesel Push and eliminate the most people.
The finish will be Reigns vs. Brock and Reigns will eliminate Brock by doing something dumb like taunting him then, when Brock charges, pull down the top rope.
Those are my big guesses for tonight. (Do you have any?)
Of course, you may have seen The World’s End years ago and don’t watch wrestling at all. In that case, I’d have to ask:
So… what are you reading and/or watching?
(Featured Image is “Edison’s Telephonoscope” by George du Maurier from Punch Almanack for 1879)
Shoveling snow and watching old movies:
Bring it on because you can never get enough of Kristin Dundst or Eliza Dusku in cheerleader outfits.
Underworld trilogy beccause you can never get enough of Kate Beckinsdale in a skin tight vinyl outfit.
Resident Evil series because you can’t get enough of Milla Jovovich kicking ass.
Making soup.Report
I’m caught up on The Expanse. Good show, people should watch it.
I have an Agent Carter on the DVR to watch. Probably watch that tonight while I am waiting for X-Files to come on, though word is that the premiere isn’t great (but the next couple supposedly are).
Almost finished with Retromania.Report
Oof, that X-Files was indeed rough. Hope tonight is better.Report
…Oh. [crestfallen]
I was about to ask.
This is disappointing to hear. Should I bother to track it down?Report
I mean, it MIGHT be worth watching just to get a thumbnail of “where has everyone been/getting the band back together”, but you can probably get that from a recap online.
Honestly, the only moment I truly loved was the final scene, with the return of CSM, and the fact that they didn’t bother to update the opening credits/theme at all. That was pretty awesome.
Supposedly tonight’s is much better from what I’ve heard (it and the next one are scripted by writers other than Carter).Report
Things are looking up. Today the roads are clear, so I had lunch at a restaurant that wasn’t one of the three within walking distance. (I noticed a Waffle House, which I am seriously considering for dinner, though Fargo has left me with some qualms.) Flying home tomorrow.Report
If you go to Waffle House, don’t order the steak.Report
Brady looks awful, by the way.Report
The pass rushing is getting to him. He’s tentative stepping up and into his throws. He’s thrown a number of that flat footed or with his weight back, landing them several yards short of his receiver.
The Broncos left points on the field but have to be happy with what the defense is doing.Report
Still, he’s a hard one to really rattle. I think the Broncos’ offense is going to have to put up at least a touchdown in the fourth quarter to win.Report
They managed with just a field goal, but it was an awfully close thing.
What was it with the Bronco who got the interception on the 2-point-conversion try and the Bronco who grabbed the onside kick? Both of them tried to advance the ball, which risked being stripped of it in return for no possible gain.Report
Starting this year, the defense can score on the two-point attempt. Two points take the difference to four, so even a successful onside kick play requires the Pats to score a TD, not kick a field goal. For the onside kick, yeah, just fall on the damned thing.
I don’t know how many years I’ve been yelling at Kubiak on the TV for exactly what he did at the end of this game. You’re ahead, 2:20 to go, one first down and you win. As I said to my wife today before the sequence started: “It’s Kubiak. Run right for nothing. Run left for nothing. Throw an incomplete touch pass on a route that the zebras won’t ever call interference. Punt and let the other team have the ball around midfield with a timeout and most of two minutes left. Pray that the defense will save your ass.”Report
Interesting new rule. But still, the probability of being able to do that successfully starting from where he intercepted it (the 1 or 2) has got to be an order of magnitude (at least) lower than the probability of losing the ball trying it.Report
Well, even if he does lose it, they have to return it all the way rather than just fall on it, since it’s still a try. But still, yeah, situational awareness.Report
He didn’t make it very far from the goal line, and there were still lots of Pats in front of him, so if the ball did come loose, they would have a much easier time scoring than him.Report
And Ginn showed in the late game how dangerous a fast guy is when he gets his hands on the ball and it all breaks down to playground time…
I agree he should have just given himself up. Even though the two points the other way would have improved the game script, it wasn’t worth it. I just think the perceived danger is worse than the actual – having an offense that just gave up a crippling interception force a fumble, then recover it without falling on it, then manage to return it all the way, is certainly possible.
But it’s also as unlikely as a backup tight end jumping in front of your #1 receiver on an onside kick you just have to possess to win the game, then muffing it. That kind of thing only happens once a decade, so we’re all safe for a couple more years at least.Report
@mike-schilling
You’ll probably appreciate this, but I’m not sure I saw a QB get harassed and hit like that since the 49ers destroyed Eli in the NFC Championship game a few years back. Eli was able to make a couple more plays (and got some help from 49ers blunders) to pull out the win. But, Jesus, I remember watching that game and thinking, “Oh yea, linebackers can be REALLY effective.” This was after watching years of the Eagles trot out also-rans at the position.Report
Brady definitely found his footing — literally and figuratively. He didn’t back. Unfortunately (for him), by that point the OL had fully collapsed and he was getting chased and thrown around like a rag doll. So even if he wasn’t backing down, he just couldn’t be very effective with Ware, Miller, et. al. in the backfield on every play.
Neither offense did much. The Pats got their lone touchdown on a gift turnover. The Broncos put two touchdown drives together and then did very little. What stood out was that the Pats offense seemed to struggle as a function of the phenomenal Broncos defense whereas the Broncos defense just seemed to struggle all on their own. The Pats have a good defense and played a good, mostly mistake free game on that side of the ball. But the Broncos offense just seemed so blah.
It felt like the Broncos were dominating the game because of how well their defense played but they never really had control of it. It is possible for the score to fail to reflect the difference between two scores… and the gap between the teams felt like more than just one score. But with Brady and the Pats, one score is one score and as we saw, was almost not enough.
Both NFC teams have good defenses — better than the Pats but not as good as the Broncos. Weirdly, that leads me to think the Pats would have had a better chance against either the Cardinals than the Panthers then the Broncos will. The Pats, with everyone healthy, were slowed only by an all-time good defense (and, yes, the Broncos were that good). The Broncos, on the other hand, were slowed by a solid defense. It is almost like the Broncos put all their eggs into beating the Patriots. Which they did. But I think they are the underdog against either of the two teams playing now.
As to @mike-schilling ‘s point, both of those were dumb dumb dumbdumbdumbdumb plays.Report
Manning’s new commercial:
“Defense saved my ancient ass.”Report
“Von Miller’s my new best friend.”Report
If he watched Carolina manhandle Arizona in the following game:
“Fish fish fish fish fishing fish.”Report
“Coach, make sure the ice bath works”Report
The Fox network wanted to maximize the 1990s TV FBI agent nostalgia by also killing Palmer on a Sunday evening.Report
“He’s dead! Wrapped in Panthers.”Report
Doesn’t the old football saying go “offense wins games, defense wins championships”? That’s pretty much what we saw here.
You’re right that the Broncos offense seemed to be…resting, the old mistake about figuring that you’ve got this in the bag and you’re already thinking about the next one. You can’t do that against the Patriots; there’s a reason they’ve got the rep that they do (no, wiseass, I am not talking about video recordings.)
If the Pats hadn’t duffed the extra-point kick waaaaay back at the beginning of the game, then the AFC championship would have gone to overtime…with a Gronkowski who had finally Hulked out.Report
Kubiak has a bad case of Shanahan’s disease: up by a touchdown in the last 7:30 of the game, the playbook is reduced to run right, run left, try a touch pass on a route where there’s no chance the zebras will give you an interference gift, punt. In that order. Just to try to fool the defense, sometimes he’ll run left on first down. Symptoms become more pronounced as the clock approaches the two-minute warning, when one lousy first down will win the game for you.Report
It seemed even worse than that… it seemed uninspired. As if they didn’t think offense even mattered.
Peyton wasn’t great but he seemed better than he did early in the year. He missed some throws but he made some good ones, especially on the two TD passes (especially ESPECIALLY the second one). His running game gave him very little, though it was hard to get a sense of how much of that was on the RBs, how much on the OL, and how much on the Pats’ defense. He wasn’t throwing to wide open guys all day and he didn’t make any boneheaded throws or decisions*. To win the Super Bowl, he’ll need to make those throws he missed — especially the two guys he missed wide open in the end zone. But I think Broncos fans should be encouraged by his performance even if the offense as a whole left them underwhelmed.
* Their lone turnover was on the botched swing pass. It was a poorly executed play and arguably a poorly conceptualized one. But Peyton put the ball where it had to be and the RB needs to make a better play on it. Maybe, MAYBE Peyton shouldn’t have thrown it given the presence of the defender, but it wasn’t a, “What the F was he thinking?” type throw.Report
Eh, all Reigns has done in the past year is continually have good to great matches, including with guy where it’s hard to have great matches with, like the Big Show. I mean, he even had a couple of decent matches with Wyatt, a guy who is entirely mediocre in the ring despite a (once) good gimmick. So, the idea he’s not ready is entirely on the basis that you think every indy dude deserves before him because they spent years toiling in the indies or you think he’s terrible on the mic – when in reality, with the current scripting, there’s nobody good on the mic anymore. There’s Heyman, who likely writes 90% of his own stuff or at least has the power to throw out the script if it blows and then, who? The New Day, doing dumb comedy? Kevin Owens, giving the same promo he’s been cutting since his first day?
And actually, I doubt Reigns is winning. They’ll screw him over, it’ll go to Triple H, and there’s your WM main event. Throw in Brock vs. Wyatt and ‘Taker vs somebody, along with AJ debuting and you have 4 pretty good matches for Mania.
Then again, the Intenret hate boner against Reigns for having the temerity to be tall, good looking, and muscular has made me want him to squash AJ, Nakamura, and the entire Bullet Club in Goldberg style squashes just to watch the IWC have a brain aneurysm. 🙂Report
I’m not saying that he should lose every match. I’m saying that if he should be beating people week after week after week, he should be doing it at the IC level rather than at the world heavyweight title level.
You know the worked storyline we used to be getting about Seth Rollins until the knee incident?
That’s the shoot storyline we’re getting with Reigns.
I resent it.
Now, if the rest of the product was consistently good, maybe I could stomach it. Lord knows, there have been years when the midcard kept me watching when the top of the card had me checking Monday Night Football scores.
As it is, there are only a handful of bright spots on the card and Reigns ain’t one of them. He *COULD* be one of them someday… but the best comparison I can make is to Rocky Maivia and, wouldn’t you know it, it was his time on the IC belt (circa WM14) that helped set the stage for his World Title runs (circa WM15).
They skipped the Intercontinential Belt phase for Reigns.
They’d have been better off having Brock Lesnar hold the title for a year with Cesaro/Ryback level opposition (with, of course, Paul Heyman giving 10 minute sermons every week) than what they’re doing now.Report
Did you also resent it when Austin was stunning everybody in sight and the whole show was about him? That’s how the WWE had worked since Bruno – there’s a big babyface and the show revolves around him. It only allowed Vince to be the last promoter standing, why would he change now? 🙂
The thing is, Reigns already had his IC title run getting built up, except it was with the tag titles with the rest of The Shield. Now, he’s past the IC title. He’s already the #2 merch seller and is headlining house show, drawing perfectly fine, and getting good reactions because there’s no cameras for smark fans to try to get themselves over. To the casual fan, they don’t need Reigns to have a year long IC title reign.
As for the not being a bright spot, like I said, he’s been consistently one of the best workers on the roster when it comes to main events, including better matches with Show & Wyatt than I expected and honestly, the only guy whose work I enjoyed more this year was probably Cena.
Personally, I would’ve said screw it and just put the belt on him at Wrestlemania last year, because it’s not like Rollin’s long reign really brought in the ratings last year and honestly, it kind of made Roman’s spring and summer kind of aimless. Especially since the whole “Brock only comes around every month and we ignore the fact we have a champion aside from that” was getting old already.
But hey, different strokes. I also think a lot of the guys the Internet goes crazy for are highly overrated, so there ya’ go. The truth is, they could book Roman perfectly for the next year and the moment he got in the main event, the same people would still hate him, so why wait?Report
Did you also resent it when Austin was stunning everybody in sight and the whole show was about him?
Was that during the same time period when The Hardyz, the Dudleyz, and the Blondiez were putting on 3 and 4 star tag team matches every week? Was that when Chris Benoit and Kirk Angel were beating the crap out of each other every other week? Was that when Eddie Guerrero and Chris Jericho were cutting promos on each other???
To answer your question, I can’t say that I really minded it being The Stone Cold (w/ Mr. McMahon) Show until around 2002/2003, honestly.Report
Isn’t WWE scrambling because of the rash of injuries? And you can’t build story lines around Lesnar because he works so seldom.Report
Yes. This is why it’s important to cultivate people on the IC level. Heck, bring back the European Belt! Only defend the World Belt on PPVs! If you want to see a belt defense for free, you’re going to be watching the IC or Euro belt match.
And I’m not suggesting storylines for Brock as much as Paul Heyman sermons followed by Ryback and Cesaro squashes. (Better Cesaro getting squashed by Brock than squashed at the IC level.)Report
I have been so sick that I finished all 7 seasons of Nurse Jackie. Now I am watching Dark Matter.
Have been reading, but not a whole lot. Juliet Marillier and like that. Comfort / induce-myself-to-feel-good-enough-to-nap books.Report
Oh, yeah, I forgot I said I would post a link to these when they were up:
Maribou’s 40ish favorite books of 2015Report
I really enjoyed Dark Matter, much more than Nurse Jackie (I kept thinking I would fire her as fast as I would fire Dr. House.)
Lets see, reading Tom McCarthys Tintin and the secret of literature, very good, but dense in a litcrit way. Picked up the new Tim Powers today and will start that tonight.sReport
Currently, I’m finishing the final third of Seveneves after a marathon session a few nights ago where I read about five hundred pages in a few hours. It’s kind of remarkable how different this book feels from almost everything Stephenson’s written before.
On The World’s End: I initially had the same reaction as you did, Jaybird, but every subsequent time I’ve watched it, it’s grown on me, to the point where I’d say it rivals my love of Shaun of the Dead. Part of it is probably that I lost my best friend growing up to addiction and so it’s a lot more emotionally resonant with me than the other two, but still, it’s worth re-watching over time…it’s a bit like a good Radiohead album that way.Report
Oh, Seveneves.
It actually felt a lot like things that Stephenson’s written before, to me; the same “we’re gonna stop doing things now so that we can have a digression about the science behind this thing the characters are looking at! And, really, the only reason they looked at it was so that we could have a digression about the science behind it. Oh, you want an action scene, really? sigh okay FINE, some guy shoots BULLETS out of his GUN. Now we’re going to use a very tortured reinterpretation of the Butlerian Jihad, only it’s about Facebook, only I’m not allowed for commercial reasons to just say ‘Facebook’.”
Anyway. Didn’t like it much. The whole story turned out to be “Fake Hillary Clinton nearly destroys the human race”, and I was wondering why they didn’t Cold Equations her ass right from the get-go. Like, close the hatch, say “oh darn everyone in the pod died, so sad, let’s get back to the base”.Report
The way Seveneves seems notably different is that he (at least so far) hasn’t done any of those amazing extended analogies wherein he makes an incredible insight into something; the most memorable one of those, at least IMO, being the long digression in Reamde where he analogizes the human brain’s attentional budgeting system to the electrical grid in Mogadishu, in the course of explaining how an MMO is being used to enable more effective airport security and other such systems. In Seveneves, he seems to communicate insight through the story itself rather than through the long digressions, and that’s what has made it seem so starkly different from his prior works.Report
Would you have closed the hatch on Julia? I think that would have been an incredibly hard thing for basically good people who were on a mission to save humanity to do. Easy enough to anticipate that she’d be trouble, hard to anticipate what that trouble would look like, but the question at that point was not “do we give her a voice in government” it was “do we leave her to die?”Report
They’re on a mission to save humanity. They’re not on a mission to save individual humans.
“the question at that point was not “do we give her a voice in government” it was “do we leave her to die?””
99.99995% of the human race had been left to die; what’s one more? I’m surprised they even bothered to look inside the ship instead of just kicking it back down into the atmosphere; it was already causing them trouble just by existing.
This is an extreme response, but the situation as described was pretty extreme already.
And what I found weird is that none of the characters ever think about this. That Stephenson either found it inconceivable that anyone would even say “you know, you really shoulda just closed the airlock door back then”. As far as I remember that never gets brought up. And Stephenson is an SF author, and I’m pretty sure he’s heard of The Cold Equations, so either A: he suffered the utter brainfart of forgetting it while writing Seveneves, or B: he left it out on purpose to make a point.Report
Act One of Seveneves was “This is what the cool parts of Lucifer’s Hammer could have been like without all the sketchy obsession with race.”
Act Two of Seveneves was a demonstration that decentralized social media is very powerful and reflective of the emotional background of its users. Stephenson thus groks my own pessimistic prejudice that Facebook is a place where awful things are simply bound to happen and we’d probably have been better off on balance without it, so I liked this part of the story a lot.
Act Three of Seveneves demonstrates Stephenson’s chops as a speculative author, presenting a society still profoundly reverberating from the effects of the events of Acts One and Two. But beyond “There will always be war and other kinds of polarized conflict,” and “When people from different societies meet they will inevitably a) have lots of fun monkey sex and b) try to kill each other, and the only question is which comes first,” I’m still not sure what else Stephenson was saying.Report
Stephenson himself refutes your interpretation of Act 2, with a short bit in Act 3 about how there’s a whole social exegesis of the events of Act 2 based around the social-media profile of some guy. He was barely even a character in Act 2–I don’t recall whether he got any lines–and the narration in Act 3 even says straight-out that they’re overanalysing things.
What I got from Act 2 was “some people are toxic, and you need to recognize this, and in certain situations containing their toxicity may be more trouble than their company is worth”.Report
Okay, out of all of my predictions, I got a grand total of zero right.
That said: I enjoyed the Ambrose/Owens match and didn’t mind the “heel is the architect of his own destruction” finish.
The Del Rio/Kalisto match was awesome and they did give these guys a little license to show the world what they had. Del Rio is bigger than the US Belt. Kalisto is perfect to hold it.
Charlotte is very, very good at being a heel. I shouldn’t be surprised. She’s great at it.
The New Day doesn’t need the belts. They’re better when they’re chasing belts than defending them. That said, if there are only two tag teams in the federation, I completely understand why they give the belts to New Day.
Aaaaaaand The Rumble. They found a spectacularly obnoxious way to not have Reigns be involved between the first quarter and the last quarter. That said, there was a lot of other stuff to hate.
They gave Kofi the b.s. non-elimination for the match and then forgot to give the punchline to the joke after spending so much time on the setup??? They make a big deal out of Kane eliminating 48 people and then only allow him to eliminate 1??? They not only cart Reigns off in a gurney but have the eliminated members of the Wyatt Family eliminate Brock instead of merely beating Brock up and having Wyatt do it???
There was some stuff that I liked, though. AJ Styles had a less that perfectly impressive debut but I was terrified that he’d be the Warlord/Santino comedy entrant the second I saw his face and he wasn’t. Kevin Owens limped to the ring. It’s nice that he remembered to sell. I’m glad that *SOMEONE* in the company remembers stuff like that. They didn’t have any comedy/nostalgia entrants which did a good job of selling that this was a personal vendetta Rumble. It wouldn’t make much sense to spend a lot of time on how this Rumble was supposed to be the end of Roman Reigns and then bring out Hornswoggle in the middle.
Stuff I don’t know how I feel about yet:
Triple H (or, as I prefer to call him, Triple HHH).Report
Okay. True Detective Season Two, Episode Three.
Let’s start with the spoiler at the end of Episode Two: Okay, one of the things I did when I was out googling this or that, I encountered an article that showed Colin Farrell in a SWAT uniform that was titled something to the effect of “why the big shootout at the end of Season Two was better than that six-minute long shot at the end of Season One”. Since, in the first two episodes, I hadn’t yet seen Colin Farrell in a SWAT uniform, I kinda knew that he wasn’t dead when he got shot at the end of Episode Two. That said: HOLY CRAPOLA AT THE END OF THAT EPISODE. THAT WAS A FREAKING AWESOME ENDING. Anyway, since I saw that article, I knew that Colin Farrell was likely to have only been shot by a beanbag or something. But the first time I saw him get shot, I thought “maybe it’s a beanbag round…” but the second blast had me say “holy crap, he’s dead”. And only then did I remember the stuff I had stumbled across a couple of weeks before. Wow. What an awesome ending to episode two.
The episode beginning in the bar with an Elvis impersonator singing “The Rose” should not have been half as good as it was.
Fred Ward as the dad? That’s some seriously good stuff right there. I hope he shows up more. Remo Williams should have been a trilogy. Hell, it should have been a franchise.
The scene where they’re at the bar and the waitress asks what’s wrong and the answer came “somebody murdered him” was a FREAKING AWESOME SCENE. That’s a really good line.
The scene where the doctor asked “Do you want to live?” was a really good scene.
When Vince Vaughn is talking to his henchman and talking about the henchman’s head and the henchman answers a question by saying “that ain’t my department but…” and then gives his opinion from the stuff that he does understand? More television shows and movies should use that particular trope. It’s a good one.
The scene with the envelope. Wow.
Vince Vaughn is a better actor than I thought he was.
The scene at the end where she’s trying to make up? I kept thinking “JUST ASK HIM TO SIT DOWN AND YOU DON’T HAVE TO TALK” and the scene ended the way it did.
This series stresses me the heck out.
I don’t know if I like it more than Season One yet.Report
True Detective Season Two, Episode Four.
The homophobic closeted homosexual trope is one that I would have thought would have been played out by 1998. Yet here we are.
Vince Vaughn is a better actor than I thought he was.
I’ve started noticing more and more that they’ve decided to put the punch more into the finale of dialogs than in the finale of monologues.
“You know what one of those (people) said to me once? I’d rather be wrong and first than right and second.”
“You’re a survivor. Everything else? Just dust in your eyes. Blink it away, man.”
“Nobody wants to feel taken advantage of.”
“You don’t remember them. They remember you.”
“I should have been there for you.” “You couldn’t have even been there for yourself.”
That scene in the diner? “I guess I love you too.” I’ve seen scenes involving suicide bombers let left me feeling less depressed about the future of humanity. And they’re playing Blind Faith “Can’t Find My Way Home”??? They’re cheating. They’re totally cheating.
“You must have had hundreds of lives.” “I don’t think I could handle another one.”
“I thought that (stuff) was behind you.” “I thought being poor was behind me too.”
Dang.
This is a good show.
This is a good, good show.
Aaron David, last week, pointed out that Lera Lynn has entered his regular rotation.
She has entered mine.
She should enter yours.Report
True Detective Season Two, Episode Five.
I don’t know how much I want to say so I’ll just say this:
Vince Vaughn is a better actor than I thought he was.
Rachel McAdams is growing on me.
Colin McFarrell is a good person to pick for your “I don’t care. If Colin McFarrell is in it, I’ll watch it!” pool.Report
“The homophobic closeted homosexual trope is one that I would have thought would have been played out by 1998. Yet here we are.”
This was an element of the show that just didn’t make sense to me in modern-day CA. If it’d been set elsewhere/elsewhen, sure. But it really didn’t seem to fit with my conception of modern-day California.Report
You forget about Prop. 8 and such. CA is a… varied place, and not all people are in positions and locals that are down with it. I haven’t seen the show, but isn’t it set in the desert half of LA? Not the most progressive area.Report
Well, he’s a CHP officer, and he isn’t out in the sticks somewhere – at the beginning of the show, he pulls over some minor Hollywood starlet. The whole thing goes a bit beyond just “not down with it”, into blackmail etc.; suffice to say the storyline just seemed a weird fit to me.Report
Well, I haven’t seen it yet, so I can’t say. But minor starlet huh? Maybe it doesn’t work…Report
It made more sense to me than it did to you.
I think there are certain cultures where such a revelation can still be damaging to your career and your personal life, no matter where in the country you live. I think of cops as being one of those.Report
The homophobic closeted homosexual trope is one that I would have thought would have been played out by 1998. Yet here we are.
No politics, but…it’s politics.Report