#taylor-kitsch

With the True Detective season finale airing this Sunday, we have to thank Season 2 of HBO’s crime anthology for all the laughs it’s given us… even though it’s not a comedy.

Related: Get Caught Up With Our ‘True Detective’ Recaps

This season, writer Nic Pizzolatto’s hard-boiled film noir dialogue sometimes (OK, often) tipped over towards the absurd, so we’re paying tribute with this compilation of the most outlandish bits of dialogue we’ve endured this season. We’ve included everything from Ray’s morsel of wisdom, “Sometimes a good beating provokes personal growth,” to Frank’s immortal, should-be-on-a-T-shirt declaration: “It’s like blue balls… in your heart.”

In fact, you’ll notice Vince Vaughn’s Frank takes up the lion’s share of this terrible-lines montage, whether he’s joking about the frequency of his wife’s period or just teaching us vocabulary words like “stridency” and “louche.” We’d say we’ve already done the hard work in compiling Vaughn’s Emmy reel for him… but we’d hate to stymie his retribution. 

¿La conexión entre Breaking Bad y Yellow King?

¿Recuerdan la más reciente teoría que une ambas temporadas de True Detective en el universo de Nic Pizzolatto? Ahora algo más loco que podría unir Breaking Bad y True Detective.

(more…)

'True Detective' Season 2 Gets a Moody Trailer, and a Premiere Date

No need to keep searching for clues: We finally have our first look at footage from True Detective Season 2… and a premiere date.

The much-anticipated sophomore season of HBO’s crime anthology will debut Sunday, June 21 — that’s soon! — and the minute-long clip above gives us some tantalizing glimpses of what’s to come: Rachel McAdams as a badass cop leading raids with guns drawn; a grizzled (and mustached!) Colin Farrell facing off against slick criminal Vince Vaughn and putting on brass knuckles; a conflicted Taylor Kitsch getting into fights; and a mystery man putting on a ski mask and shushing us in a very creepy manner. (Along with haunting music and beautiful cinematography, of course.)

Related: ‘True Detective’ Season 2: Everything We Know So Far

We have to admit: For all the bad buzz surrounding the unorthodox Season 2 casting, this trailer has got us extremely excited to see what’s next. And we haven’t even heard any dialogue yet! In Nic Pizzolatto we trust.

New 'True Detective' Trailer: The Characters Speak! (And They All Have Issues)

We got our first taste of True Detective Season 2 last month with a dialogue-free teaser trailer that was heavy on mood and atmosphere. (That song!) Even without the actors saying a word, we were sold.

But still, it’d be nice to hear the characters, you know, talk a little at some point. And we get just that from HBO’s newly-released trailer, which you can watch above. The atmosphere is still there, with lots of sprawling highways and dusty back alleys — but each of the four big-name stars also get a line of cryptically portentous dialogue:

* Vince Vaughn, as career criminal Frank Seymon: “Sometimes your worst self… is your best self.” (Is he doing an accent? Too early to tell.)

* Colin Farrell, as detective Ray Velcoro, examining his bruised knuckles: “My strong suspicion is, we get the world we deserve.” (Hey, that would make a great tagline!)

* Taylor Kitsch, as highway patrolman Paul Woodrugh, riding a motorcycle in full CHIPs gear: “This isn’t me doing this. This isn’t me.”

* Rachel McAdams, as detective Ani Bezzerides, stabbing the hell out of a dummy with a knife: “This girl’s gone missing. Nobody cares. The interior’s poisoned, and suddenly worth billions. Nobody cares.”

We’re still a little fuzzy on the actual plot (OK, a lot fuzzy), but the visual grandeur we loved in Season 1 is on full display here, with Vaughn setting fire to a restaurant kitchen and Kitsch revealing what looks like a nasty full-body burn on his torso. Cancel our plans for June 21; we’re stocking our fridge with Lone Star beer as we speak.

True Detective began its season on Sunday night by taking its sluggish sweet time getting around to the case that will presumably drive the eight-episode drama. Creator Nic Pizzolatto burned through some of the good will he accumulated from True Detective’s much-praised first, Matthew McConaughey-Woody Harrelson season by languorously filling us in on a trio of new detectives: Colin Farrell’s police detective Ray Velcoro, Rachel McAdams’s sheriff’s detective Ani Bezzerides, and Taylor Kitsch as California Highway patrolman Paul Woodrugh. Each of them had his or her reasons to be unhappy, and, God knows, unhappiness is certainly the oppressive prevailing mood in the new True Detective.

Warning: Spoilers follow for the season premiere of True Detective. 

No one had so much as a crooked grin in the Sunday premiere on HBO. The first shot of Farrell talking in a car, courtesy of director Justin Lin (The Fast and the Furious), was a kind of mirthlessly jokey nod to the first season: After all those rambling car conversations between McConaughey and Harrelson, we expected Farrell’s passenger to be a fellow cop. Instead, it was Velcoro’s young son, duly required to look miserable on a ride to school, new sneakers on his feet and heaviness in his heart. 

Velcoro drinks too much, has lost his moral compass, and acts out in part because of a horrific crime committed against his wife that he feels guilty he was unable to prevent. Bezzerides and Woodrugh have their own buried-history problems. A search for a missing woman led Bezzerides very conveniently to an “institute” overseen by her father, who takes his fashion look from the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. He was played by David Morse with typical finesse, even though the script required him to be little more than a counterculture burn-out, a self-centered creep who would have repelled Don Draper if the once-and-future Coke ad man had stumbled into this helter-skelter commune to perform his meditations in an emergency. And based on True Detective’s previous season and this new first hour, I interpreted Morse’s smug dissection of his daughter’s hostility — “you’re angry at the entire world and men in particular” — as a gratuitous swipe none of the men have thus far endured, a suggestion that Pizzolatto is still working through the woman-character problem that many of his critics leveled at him for True Detective’s first season.

Woodrugh’s problems are hazier — is he depressed because he’s impotent, or impotent because he’s depressed, and how much of that is just a Viagra-stoked metaphor for his powerlessness in the True Detective triangle? — but no less tedious. Sorry, you three, but the notion that you’ve had a difficult childhood is no excuse to walk around with a hate-the-world glare 24/7 once you reach adulthood. I wanted to stand Velcoro, Bezzerides, and Woodrugh in a line and slap them sequentially, Three Stooges-style, to get them to snap out of their un-funky funks. 

I also wonder how much the blood-spraying, brass-knuckle beating Velcoro delivered to the father of a boy who bullied the detective’s son alienated the character from the TV audience. Pizzolatto offered it up as an intentional jolt of action, of character-establishing, of tough-guys-will-be-tough-guys fare. But coming on the heels of the controversy the recently-departed Game of Thrones season sparked over HBO-sponsored violence, that brutality is culturally provocative.

Related: ‘True Detective’ Recap: Turn Those Frowns Upside Down, Guys!

By the end of the hour, the corpse with no eyes who had a Maltese-looking falcon as a backseat companion — city manager Ben Caspere (certainly one of the more thankless roles I can recall recently) — brought our three detectives together so they could glower at the body and each other. “Caspere’s death is a window into everything,” a police official told our antiheroes — thus emphasizing the ripe irony that Caspere’s own windows, his eyes, had been burned away by acid, destroyed along with more private parts in a torture-murder. 

Caspere was the point-man for a big business deal whose success will make or break Vince Vaughn’s casino owner Frank Semyon (what, does Nic Pizzolatto not know anyone with a simple surname like “Smith” or “Patel”?). Frank has his hooks in Velcoro (the former helped the latter find the guy who raped Velcoro’s wife years ago), and he’s True Detective’s focal point in a major land-grab scheme that will bring money into the small, corrupt town of Vinci. Instead of diverting water — the California plot-device in an obvious True Detective precursor, Roman Polanski and Robert Towne’s 1973 Chinatown — the show has Frank fixating on a high-speed rail line that’ll divert traffic and bring “hundreds of millions” in federal grants to the vice-ridden, scummy town of Vinci. 

Although True Detective’s title necessarily places its emphasis on the three cops, the second-billed Vaughn is just as important to the prolix proceedings. A self-made man out to make himself more wealthy and powerful, Vaughn’s Frank seems, this early on, one of Pizzolatto’s more sympathetic characters, haunted by a bad, poverty-ridden childhood that renders him something more than the violent thug the cop Velcoro can be.

It’s one thing to take your time laying out the facts that will accumulate to achieve a crime-solver plot; it’s another to keep things moving. By chance, I re-watched Robert Altman’s 1974 The Long Goodbye not long ago and was struck by the artfully aimless yet subtly purposeful path Altman guided Elliott Gould’s Philip Marlowe toward his Raymond Chandler-Leigh Brackett-devised mystery. You could think that, given all the genre influences Pizzolatto plants in the new season — I detailed a lot of them here — perhaps we should also think of the pacing of this new True as an homage to the discursive style of so many filmmakers who did interesting work in the ‘70s. (In addition to Altman, I can imagine Pizzolatto being turned on by the loser-epics of writer-directors such as Bob Rafelson, Paul Schrader, Brian DePalma, Jean-Luc Godard, Arthur Penn, Monte Hellman, late-period Sam Peckinpah, and one-offs such as Ivan Passer’s 1971 George Segal junkie film-poem Born to Win.) 

“I welcome judgment,” Velcoro said early on in Sunday’s premiere. OK, then, here’s mine: Based on the three episodes made available to critics, I’m all-in for this season, no matter how much I might groan about Pizzolatto’s gassily pretentious dialogue and philosophizing. While I’m not a sucker for that stuff, or impressed in the way of this hilariously fawning Vanity Fair profile of Pizzolatto, I do have a big appetite for hard-boiled fiction of all sorts, and so I’m willing to cut True Detective a lot of slack. Certainly the three episodes contain individual scenes of bone-dry wit and abrupt action that give it a bruising allure. The question is whether the good genre stuff will ultimately outweigh the portentous weight the shaky plot and characterization is forced to bear so far.

Nuevo trailer de True Detective

Al fin HBO ha revelado el primer trailer de la segunda temporada de True Detective, y al fin podemos ver a sus estelares detectives.

(more…)