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shadowkatMomster: Have you seen Justified yet?
ME: not yet, but on DVR. Is it good?
Momster: Oh so good. The lines, the dialogue, the acting. Brilliant. Also your father and I have been listening to interviews with Timothy Olyphant (the Momster's new TV boyfriend). In the NPR interview he was talking about his kids wanting a cat. So he bought some cat food, put it out in the yard and slowly brought it to the door, luring the neighbor's kitty. Now, he tells the interviewer, the kids get to play with a kitty, but I don't have to buy a cat, I can just borrow the neighbor's kitty. In another interview - on the radio that your father listened to..he said that originallyRaylan Gibbons Boyd Crowder was supposed to be really racist, but Olyphant Wayne Goggins refused to play it that way and changed the character. He didn't want the character to be racist. (Not at all surprised, FX is obsessed with dark nasty anti-heroes, and thinks it's more realistic. Seriously, it's frigging television, it's not REALISTIC. NO TV SHOW IS! NOT EVEN THE REALITY ONES. It's just offensive and makes the writers look like asswipes or barking dogs. So - Kudos to Tim Olyphant Wayne Goggins, the Momster has great taste in tv boyfriends. Even when she steals mine. ;-) ETA: Apparently my father listened to two interviews back to back while driving and confused Goggins interview with Olyphant's - see comments in lj for clarification - sorry for confusion.)
Just saw the newest episode of Justified and it definitely has the best dialogue of any show I've seen on tv or netflix in the last six months. Will give it that. I kept rewinding. Very well written. Also the most violent television show I've seen next to possibly The Walking Dead.
Violence Meter? Hmmm. Well let's see three possibly four gunfights. Six people dead. Two people beaten up. But hey, equal opportunity, one is hit in the head with a skillet by a woman. Also a woman is shot in the head - sort of cold-blooded. So, I'd say about a 10 on the rictor scale.
Yet, oddly, still less violent than the Sopranoes, True Blood, Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad and The Wire. Which hold the record.
If you ignore the violence, which I do, because it's not that bad - relatively little gore or blood, and mostly noise, also no one you remotely care about. The hero does get wounded from time to time, but not dead. Because, hello, the hero. You don't kill the leads in these shows - they aren't soap operas, if they die they are sort of gone and then the show is well over. Which is why non-soap serial dramas are comforting, you know the lead characters will survive and beat the bad guys for at least the length of the series. It's when the series is about to end that you should start worrying. Then anything is possible.
Not much to say. Other's have reviewed in depth and I have to go to bed to get up tomorrow early, write up a change order, a negotiation email, and run off to a kick-off meeting for the design of a railroad pocket track. Along with a bunch of other things. At least it is Friday, right? Ah life.
Spent the last twenty minutes envying Tim Olyphant's wife for getting to kiss that chest every morning. I'm shamefacedly heterosexual, I admit it. The male body is a beautiful thing. Particularly long and lean. The other half of the episode, I spent trying to figure out who the actor was that was playing the hitman Fletcher, that Raylan has to fight at the end. I've seen that actor before, but I can't for the life of me place him. If you know? Holler.
This was an aptly named episode. "The Gunfighter". If you are a fan of the Western Genre or weaned on it, because your parents adore it, like mine do, than you've seen the Gregory Peck/John Ford classic The Gunfighter - 1930s, I believe. Black and White. It has a scene that is the echo of the gunfight scene in this one. I've seen this done more than once - it's a Western Trope Classic.
The hitman or rival, places his gun on the table and tells the other guy to go for it, at the end of the count - they both reach for the gun. The one who grabs first and shoots the other guy wins.
Except it's a bit like poker. A game of bluff, counter-bluff, and quick moves.
This scene is built up to beautifully - that's 90% of a good script or story - the build. That's what Glee did wrong this week. It's what many a tv show may fail at. If you don't build up to the climax - you end up with an anti-climax. It is a delicate thing. Requires skill. These guys pull it off.
We are first shown, note shown NOT told (that's key), that Raylan is recovering from a gun-shot wound. It's three weeks after he was shot in the side. It has affected his ability to shoot fast effectively. We see him at the gun range and are shown how he is just slightly off his game. We see him examine his wound. We see his pal Boyd Crowder fight him and push him through a window for not letting Boyd have Dickie. And we're shown in various other ways how and why he is off his game because of that wound and assigned to desk duty.
We are also shown, simultaneously the expertise of Fletcher - a master hitman. Fletcher is on his game. He's coldblooded. And his trick is to give the other guy a chance, or pretend to. We know because we see him do it in another scene, what he plans on doing to Winona and Raylan. That he will knife Raylan in the hand, grab the gun off the table-cloth and shoot him, then Winona in the head. Unless Raylan outwits him. Can he? Well, of course, Raylan is the lead...but how? We don't know how? Raylan is injured.
And Raylan just watches him. Keeps his eyes on him the whole time, pulls the gun to him with the edge of the table cloth, flips it into his hand, and fires - Gunfighter style. While the other guy, Fletcher wastes his time stabbing an empty tablecloth.
Beautiful. And the lines? Classic. So well done. Is it predictable? Maybe. But it is so well built - it pays off. See predictablity is NOT a bad thing. It often is better than the shocking plot twist or surprise, when it is built up well. Each piece fitting the next. A work of pure beauty.
Few do it well. Because to do something that seamless requires skill. You got to be good to make it look that easy.
Other favorite scenes? The look on Dickie's face when he realizes Boyd Crowder is in prison with him. (And we finally figure out why Boyd attacked Raylan at the police station - to get into prison so he could take out Dickie or at least make Dickie pay for shooting Ava.)
Ava hitting that asshole with the skillet to get her point across - that with Boyd in prison, she's in charge. And Arlo Gibbons statement: You didn't have to do that Ava.
Ava: Clearly I did, or I wouldn't have done it.
Ava's action is in a way foreshadowing for Raylan's later in the episode. She appears to be harmless, weak. Her arm in a sling. But she picks up the skillet and whams it upside the guy's head with barely a how de do. Demonstrating that looks can be deceiving. Nice pattern and follow-throw. Both Ava and Raylan are still forces to be reckoned with, wounded or not.
And the lovely scene with Nick Searchy's Cheif, where Raylan tells the Chief how he screwed up.
Raylan: I can give orders from the radio.
Chief: That's my job, asshole.
Great first episode. But then all of Justified first episodes are great...hope they keep it up.
ME: not yet, but on DVR. Is it good?
Momster: Oh so good. The lines, the dialogue, the acting. Brilliant. Also your father and I have been listening to interviews with Timothy Olyphant (the Momster's new TV boyfriend). In the NPR interview he was talking about his kids wanting a cat. So he bought some cat food, put it out in the yard and slowly brought it to the door, luring the neighbor's kitty. Now, he tells the interviewer, the kids get to play with a kitty, but I don't have to buy a cat, I can just borrow the neighbor's kitty. In another interview - on the radio that your father listened to..he said that originally
Just saw the newest episode of Justified and it definitely has the best dialogue of any show I've seen on tv or netflix in the last six months. Will give it that. I kept rewinding. Very well written. Also the most violent television show I've seen next to possibly The Walking Dead.
Violence Meter? Hmmm. Well let's see three possibly four gunfights. Six people dead. Two people beaten up. But hey, equal opportunity, one is hit in the head with a skillet by a woman. Also a woman is shot in the head - sort of cold-blooded. So, I'd say about a 10 on the rictor scale.
Yet, oddly, still less violent than the Sopranoes, True Blood, Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad and The Wire. Which hold the record.
If you ignore the violence, which I do, because it's not that bad - relatively little gore or blood, and mostly noise, also no one you remotely care about. The hero does get wounded from time to time, but not dead. Because, hello, the hero. You don't kill the leads in these shows - they aren't soap operas, if they die they are sort of gone and then the show is well over. Which is why non-soap serial dramas are comforting, you know the lead characters will survive and beat the bad guys for at least the length of the series. It's when the series is about to end that you should start worrying. Then anything is possible.
Not much to say. Other's have reviewed in depth and I have to go to bed to get up tomorrow early, write up a change order, a negotiation email, and run off to a kick-off meeting for the design of a railroad pocket track. Along with a bunch of other things. At least it is Friday, right? Ah life.
Spent the last twenty minutes envying Tim Olyphant's wife for getting to kiss that chest every morning. I'm shamefacedly heterosexual, I admit it. The male body is a beautiful thing. Particularly long and lean. The other half of the episode, I spent trying to figure out who the actor was that was playing the hitman Fletcher, that Raylan has to fight at the end. I've seen that actor before, but I can't for the life of me place him. If you know? Holler.
This was an aptly named episode. "The Gunfighter". If you are a fan of the Western Genre or weaned on it, because your parents adore it, like mine do, than you've seen the Gregory Peck/John Ford classic The Gunfighter - 1930s, I believe. Black and White. It has a scene that is the echo of the gunfight scene in this one. I've seen this done more than once - it's a Western Trope Classic.
The hitman or rival, places his gun on the table and tells the other guy to go for it, at the end of the count - they both reach for the gun. The one who grabs first and shoots the other guy wins.
Except it's a bit like poker. A game of bluff, counter-bluff, and quick moves.
This scene is built up to beautifully - that's 90% of a good script or story - the build. That's what Glee did wrong this week. It's what many a tv show may fail at. If you don't build up to the climax - you end up with an anti-climax. It is a delicate thing. Requires skill. These guys pull it off.
We are first shown, note shown NOT told (that's key), that Raylan is recovering from a gun-shot wound. It's three weeks after he was shot in the side. It has affected his ability to shoot fast effectively. We see him at the gun range and are shown how he is just slightly off his game. We see him examine his wound. We see his pal Boyd Crowder fight him and push him through a window for not letting Boyd have Dickie. And we're shown in various other ways how and why he is off his game because of that wound and assigned to desk duty.
We are also shown, simultaneously the expertise of Fletcher - a master hitman. Fletcher is on his game. He's coldblooded. And his trick is to give the other guy a chance, or pretend to. We know because we see him do it in another scene, what he plans on doing to Winona and Raylan. That he will knife Raylan in the hand, grab the gun off the table-cloth and shoot him, then Winona in the head. Unless Raylan outwits him. Can he? Well, of course, Raylan is the lead...but how? We don't know how? Raylan is injured.
And Raylan just watches him. Keeps his eyes on him the whole time, pulls the gun to him with the edge of the table cloth, flips it into his hand, and fires - Gunfighter style. While the other guy, Fletcher wastes his time stabbing an empty tablecloth.
Beautiful. And the lines? Classic. So well done. Is it predictable? Maybe. But it is so well built - it pays off. See predictablity is NOT a bad thing. It often is better than the shocking plot twist or surprise, when it is built up well. Each piece fitting the next. A work of pure beauty.
Few do it well. Because to do something that seamless requires skill. You got to be good to make it look that easy.
Other favorite scenes? The look on Dickie's face when he realizes Boyd Crowder is in prison with him. (And we finally figure out why Boyd attacked Raylan at the police station - to get into prison so he could take out Dickie or at least make Dickie pay for shooting Ava.)
Ava hitting that asshole with the skillet to get her point across - that with Boyd in prison, she's in charge. And Arlo Gibbons statement: You didn't have to do that Ava.
Ava: Clearly I did, or I wouldn't have done it.
Ava's action is in a way foreshadowing for Raylan's later in the episode. She appears to be harmless, weak. Her arm in a sling. But she picks up the skillet and whams it upside the guy's head with barely a how de do. Demonstrating that looks can be deceiving. Nice pattern and follow-throw. Both Ava and Raylan are still forces to be reckoned with, wounded or not.
And the lovely scene with Nick Searchy's Cheif, where Raylan tells the Chief how he screwed up.
Raylan: I can give orders from the radio.
Chief: That's my job, asshole.
Great first episode. But then all of Justified first episodes are great...hope they keep it up.
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no subject
Date: 2012-01-20 05:36 am (UTC)Boyd, though, is another story, given that he had his whole Aryan nation thing going on (in fact, one of the funniest scenes in the pilot of the show to me was when Raylan asks Boyd if he even knows any Jews. Again, this was taken verbatim from the novella "Fire in the Hole.")
no subject
Date: 2012-01-20 01:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-20 01:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-20 02:08 pm (UTC)"GOGGINS: On some level, but I never believed that Boyd Crowder was a white supremacist, to be quite honest with you. In my conversations with both the network and with Graham Yost, our executive producer, and Tim Olyphant, it was very important for me as an actor not to play this guy as a white supremacist but to play him as a bit of a svengali: a person who doesn't necessarily believe all that he espouses.
You know, I've made four Southern movies. I've been in quite a few Southern films. And initially, when this was sent to me, I wasn't interested in playing another Southern guy labeled as a racist.
You know, I think racism is a problem throughout our country, and it's not confined to those states below the Mason-Dixon line. And for me, I did not want to perpetuate a stereotype. So I had them take out references to our president, Barack Obama, and I wouldn't say the N-word, and I said I would do this if Raylan was able to point out that Boyd doesn't necessarily believe that which he is saying, and that was very important to me.
And the other thing that I wanted to explore with Boyd, which I think is more appropriate for him as a person, kind of getting in his skin, was to explore his intellect. And I don't think that that was there in the original pilot. It was tweaked very easily, just a couple of different sentences here and there that explored how smart this guy really was. That was important to me, more so than - that was interesting to me. To be a racist didn't interest me." (http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=145159926)
Sorry to be so pedantic - I just found it startling that the producers who had been so faithful to Leonard's work in every way would suddenly introduce a characteristic that Raylan doesn't have. Whereas Boyd could, I think, be read either as genuinely racist or as an opportunist or as a bit of both. I think they definitely went for opportunistic with him, since there were black members of his "flock" back in season 1.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-20 05:02 pm (UTC)Politicians/world leaders - those names he remembers, actors? Not so much.
Then again, my mother was relating a story that he told to her to me over the phone long distance. Talk about hearsay. (But I did state the info in the context of - related by mother about an interview my father heard..)
Unless I provide an actual link? It's
not necessarily reliable just memory.
Anywho thank you for the correction. ;-)
no subject
Date: 2012-01-20 06:50 pm (UTC)In any event, I have to thank you because I ended up listening to both of those interviews today and enjoyed them very much.
And to your initial point, I thought the episode was great!
no subject
Date: 2012-01-21 12:39 am (UTC)(Was at work when I read it...and been suffering from a head-ache inducing cystic zit on the bridge of my nose all day long.)
Thanks for the correction. Spoke to the Momster just now..she didn't hear either of the NPR interviews, she watch Tim O on Ellen, and he didn't say it on Ellen. But admits my father probably got confused.
Makes a lot more sense for it to be Wayne Goggins interview, because his character started out as racist, then changed. So glad. I love the character of Boyd Crowder.