If Filmspotting has a problem it's not that it's pretentious*; it's that it's a bit staid. The old co-host, Matty, was more lively and had a better sense of humor than Larsen (who seems like a genuinely nice guy, nothing against him). Adam and Josh are almost too nice, or maybe it's that they're nice in the same sort of let's-agree-to-disagree kind of way. Now if one of them was a nice fella and the other had a more acerbic personality, that would be a more interesting dynamic to listen to. Thus the best shows these days are the ones where someone else comes into the mix (like Michael Phillips).

* They seem pretty down to Earth to me. They're jolly, plus with the "massacre theater" and top-5 lists and other diversions, it all feels purposefully light-hearted. Pretentiousness is basically phoniness, trying to come off as more sophisticated than you actually are. I don't get that vibe from them.

Grizzly Man
What is it about this man's thick German accent that drives bears to murder?

It being a miniseries rather than a standard TV show, I'm guessing the connections between some of these things are going to be made clear in the home stretch. Right now we're about halfway home. Midway through a first viewing of PULP FICTION, you're sitting there going "So, what the heck was all that business at the beginning with the two British people, and what does it have to do with anything?" A perfectly valid question at that point in time. The correct answer to which is "Keep watching." 

At this point, I'd almost go so far as to say that the central mystery in this mystery is not "Who's the killer?" but "What the fuck happened to/between Cohle and Hart and just how much are they each trying to hide in 2012?" The latter question interests the two black present-day detectives who interview Cohle/Hart as much as the former question. (I like that the black detectives stand-in for we the audience in many ways, but they're also kind of mysterious and distant to us. Often it's hard to tell what tree they're barking up.) I really enjoy how Marty seems to be the same arrogant prick all these years later, but Russ has gone off the deep end, long hair and tallboys in the afternoon.

My girlfriend believes the story will end with Cohle and Marty reuniting for one last case and going out to catch their man. I don't know about that. That's too trope-y, it seems to me. Everything about this show indicates that this is the kind of story in which maybe the bad guy gets away with it.

It was Steadicam. The operator should get some kind of special medal.

It wasnt done in one shot simply for the sake of doing it in one shot, either. That's what I got off on. It wasn't a gimmick. At that point in the episode, it was simply the most effective way to tell the story and bring us into the moment-to-moment experience of Russ. The focus is on the action. IOW, it's not one of those one-shot takes that implicitly asks us "How cool is it that we're doing this in one shot, y'all?" It's entirely serving the action, what's going on.

Yeah, colloquially people tend to understand "theory" to mean something like "someone's unproven explanation they dreamed up for something." A scientific theory is not that. They hear evolutionary *theory*, then, and it sounds like this tenuous thing, one "theory" among many.

It's also worth noting that science is competitive. If a particular finding is published, scientists all over the world can benefit in numerous ways if they're able to discredit/disprove/add to that finding. There's a whole range of findings that could theoretically call evolution by means of natural selection into question. Every creationist and/or I.D. "scientist" in the world can do this. All they have to do is come up with some actual science -- replicatable findings in put out in an established, peer-reviewed publication. They'd be instantly famous. So far, crickets. They publish their "findings" in their own journals precisely because the work would never stand up to proper scientific scrutiny.

My favorite PSH scene is "the skeptic scene" in THE MASTER. Lancaster Dodd is holding forth about "the Cause's travels into the past" at a lavish soiree held in his honor. A man starts interrupting and asking challenging questions. The tension builds until it boils over, then turns in an even more surprising direction. Hoffman navigates the the scene beautifully. Very few actors like him.

The last five minutes of this latest episode was simultaneously the coolest and the weirdest thing I've seen so far this year.

Someone needs to compile all of the McConaughey character's musings into an anthology. Or make some motivational posters. Well, I guess tumblr is already on it...

Hear, hear.

I was so on board with this show 10 minutes into episode one. I had high expectations, which so far have been met.

By now it's an old refrain, but McConaughey really is awesome. Harrelson too.

I think a lot of mystery-genre television actually doesn't execute mystery storytelling very well. TRUE DETECTIVE is doing something cool in that the characters, their relationships and backstories, are sort of a mystery too, in addition to the central whodunnit. The going back-and-forth in time doesn't at all feel forced. Really impressed with this show so far.

I would hope there's near-universal agreement here that, when it comes to what is and is not clinical depression, there's a difference between the opinion of a qualified mental health clinician and the opinion of, well, whatever we are. A bunch of guys who saw a film. It'd be interesting to hear what an actual psychiatrist thinks about Ryan Stone.

But like Trey suggests, it's less important how we'd characterize her problem and more important that we recognize that she has this problem. She goes from sleepwalking thru life since after her kid died to getting a second shot (rebirth) at living life zealously and joyously (more like the way Kowalski and that other dude seemed to live life). If you get that, then you've gotten the film, irrespective of whether you feel Ryan is clinically depressed or not.

This is a minor point, but it's come up here and there. If you've ever seen him interviewed, it seems to me Alfonso Cuaron (and Jonas for that matter) speaks English extremely well. He simply speaks it with a thick Spanish accent. Which can make it seem to native speakers like he doesn't have full command of English. But if you watch the above clip, it's pretty clear he speaks English with more perspicacity than most Americans. So the notion that there's somehow a language barrier, and that that accounts for the as-you-knows etc., might be a stretch.