True Detective Series Two

Sleuth or Dare

True Detective Series Two
8 episodes June - August 2015
USA HBO

Okay... so the second series of True Detective takes a bunch of new characters and locations and, as far as I can tell, doesn’t actually relate to the first series in any way. This one is set in Vinci, California and deals with three police detectives (initially, their status changes somewhat throughout the course of the story) and one career criminal who is trying to leave his illegal empire building behind him and retire to a lucrative, legitimate business.

So the three detectives of the tale are Detective Ray Velcoro played by Colin Farrell, Detective Ani Bezzerides played by Rachel McAdams, Officer Paul Woodrugh played by Taylor Kitsch and all three of these are from different territories, teamed up initially to solve the murder of the right hand man of the career criminal... a victim who has been tortured to death and his eyes burned out with acid. 

The fourth protagonist of the tale is the criminal himself, Frank Semyon played by Vince Vaughn... who wants to find out who is attacking him through the death of his employee and just what is going on and, of course, will it impede him in his chance to become a legitimate business man. 

Now, I was not as on board with this one at first... mainly because I liked the first series so much and particularly the two characters played by Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey. But... and this is no bad thing... this second show is definitely not trying to reproduce the same atmosphere used there and, as I slowly got into the characters and how the various pieces of the jigsaw come together, I enjoyed this one almost as much. 

There are a couple of basic similarities to the first one though. Such as the story taking place over different time zones. However, in the first series it was a good decade or two between settings and this one takes place for two weeks over the first part of the case and then just a couple of months down the line, after the aftermath of the carnage of the shoot out which ends the investigation. Unlike the first one, though, it doesn’t ping pong between the two times and is presented in a more linear fashion.

Secondly, the initial investigations in the first two seasons ends the careers of the main protagonists... and this one, with the catalyst for that happening at the end of episode four in a most spectacular action sequence, sees them coming together again to work the case and dive deeper into it a little later. 

So, yeah, this one has a very different atmosphere from the first season and, I think if I were to compare it to something... and this was perhaps on the mind of the writer simply by osmosis... it would be the novels of ace crime writer James Ellroy, especially his LA Quartet of novels. I mean, the characters in this are all either bad and compromised in some way or have a huge chip on their shoulders. Or both. It’s like the world of Ellroy’s LA, where nobody is really good, especially the cops, is playing out in a slightly more toned down version here. It’s not as in-your-face violently gory as Ellroy, quite a lot of the brutality is implied here... but I can’t help but think Ellroy’s writing must have has at least some influence on the DNA of season two of this show. 

The acting is terrific. I’ve never been a fan of Colin Farrell in the past but he does an excellent job here of giving his character many facets which gives the audience an insight into his motivations and choices. McAdams is equally good in this and, as the only one who isn’t bent and on the take initially, she has a steely determination which puts other characters on edge. Taylor Kitsch is incredible in this. It took me a while to figure out that this fairly ‘contained to the point of instability’, confused character once played a very confident John Carter of Mars (reviewed here). He looks totally different here and, if I hadn’t read the cast list, I would have never known it was him. 

And as for Vincent Vaughn, well. Such an understated performance where he mostly uses his eyes and forehead to give an air of intimidation but, also a certain thoughtfulness. He’s a man who wears his history on his sleeve almost and, even though you see him do brutal things (like using pliers to extract the gold teeth of someone who won’t do what they’re told), you end up totally sympathising with him somehow and, yeah, rooting for him by the end of the show, for sure. In much the same way you sympathise with Robert DeNiro’s character in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In America, even though you know he’s done brutal things in his past. Vaughn, who I’ve seen do both comedy and human monster really well, in the same film no less in Freaky (reviewed here), really manages to ring the sympathy out of this while being totally shark-like in his role of head hoodlum (something which Jimmy Cagney could also channel well in some of his gangster pictures, if memory serves). It was such a good choice to cast him here and he pretty much steals any scene he’s in, in my opinion. 

And, yeah, that’s me done. The ending is not remotely similar to that of the first season, in the way things get resolved (or might possibly get some kind of closure after the end of the last episode) and the downward spiral it takes is not much less than the audience may be expecting by the last few episodes. So, yeah, it’s hard to compare it to the first series since they are both very different animals but I certainly thought True Detective Series Two was very good television and is worth a watch if you are into stories with a gritty undertone to them. 

Freaky

Freaky Friday
The 13th

Freaky
USA 2020
Directed by Christopher Landon
Blumhouse

Warning: Big spoilers on this one so,
if you want to go in cold then don’t read this yet.

Okay, so this is kinda bizarre but, less than an hour after I came up with a title for my review of Freaky, I found out that one of the original working titles for the film was... Freaky Friday The 13th so... yeah, I guess I joined the dots maybe. Either way... this one wasn’t initially on my watch list (I hate the word Freaky, just one of those things) and I had decided to ignore it but then I found out that, not only was one of my favourite living composers, Bear McCreary, doing the score but that there was also a limited edition CD release (which I obviously pre-ordered). Then my cousin, who moved to Australia, saw it and recommended it to me so, yeah, I caved in and watched it (and then waited 10 months to post this review because it’s only, finally, just come out at the cinema over her in the UK... if I'd had known it was going to get a proper cinema release here then I would certainly have waited for it). Frankly, all the marketing people behind the movie would have needed to do was let me know that the film is written and directed by the same guy who made the truly brilliant Happy Death Day movies (reviewed here and here) and I would have been on board straight away (we need a third movie in that series guys!).

So, just like the first Happy Death Day movie (and, to some extent, the second) was a remake of Groundhog Day, so too is Freaky another ‘horrified’ remake of a popular classic. In this case, the tie in is specifically the Walt Disney movie (and all the other remakes) of Freaky Friday (a film I’ve never watched in either of its incarnations because it has Freaky in the title... see last paragraph) but, those were in turn based on the novel Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers which was, as I’m sure most of you know, cribbed itself from the English literary classic body swap novel Vice Versa: A Lesson to Fathers by F. Anstey, which in turn was made into TV shows and movies called things like Vice Versa and, of course, the famous Tom Hanks movie using the same concept, Big. So... a movie with a long lineage but, as far as I know, this one has a slightly unique take on the concept in terms of the characters.

In this one we have the main protagonist, Millie, a high school girl played by Kathryn Newton and we also have Vince Vaughn as the Jason Vorhees style serial killer known as The Blissfield Butcher. The Vaughn character initially doesn’t speak, just gives penetrating stares through his hockey mask and, in a pre-credits set up to show how much of a bad person he is, visits violent death to a group of four teenagers in quite gory ways. That’s one of the things which is interesting about this movie in that, although there were stabbings and any manner of deaths in the Happy Death Day franchise series, this film really goes back to late 1970s/1980s slasher levels of goriness. For instance, in this film you will see people stabbed in the eye with packing hooks, split into two pieces by a buzz saw and, in a particularly memorable death in the pre-credits sequence, a person has a broken bottle forced into his mouth and down his throat until we see the shards of glass bloating his neck out and trying to force themselves out again. So, yeah, I don’t know what rating this movie has but it’s definitely got the kind of 'old school 1970s' levels of violence which you just don’t really see done well in slasher movies these days (I’m not sure, at this point, if all this made it into the UK cinema print).

That being said, I really find films with gruesome deaths unwatchable and less than compelling unless  it's either a) an Italian giallo or b) there is substantial other stuff going on in the film to hold the interest and, thankfully, Freaky has that second thing in spades. Just like the Happy Death Day movies, it has a very strong, self aware sort of broad humour running through it and, much of the time, it falls into the realm of comedy more than anything else.

So, anyway, due to an old Aztec (I think) knife, when The Blissfield Butcher tries to stab Millie, he gets chased away but, at the stroke of midnight, Millie and The Butcher swap bodies. And that’s where the real fun begins, as it transpires that the real Millie, inside Vince Vaughn’s body, has to recover the knife from ‘police evidence’ and find The Butcher (inside Millie’s body) and stab him/her before another 24 hours is up or the change will become permanent. Comic shenanigans ensue as Vince Vaughn, effectively playing a teenage girl with a crush on one of her/his classmates, tries to convince his friends of his real identity while hiding from the police. Meanwhile, Kathryn Newton takes on the minimalistic, cold dead stare of a serial killer and starts murdering various people at high school in various, imaginative ways.

And it’s a real pleasure. The film actually feels a little like those Happy Death Day movies so, I’m assuming that this is a certain amount of the director’s style coming to the forefront and he does familiar stuff like the long, sweeping establishing shots following the leads and also splitting the story into chapters by day, counting down from the night of the pre-credits killings until Friday the 13th, when everything is destined to come to a conclusion, one way or another.

Everything’s pretty cool and, like the director’s previous two movies, the teenagers who Millie hangs out with are mostly nice people and so you’re invested in the characters more. Vince Vaughn really plays the comedy routines well and truly lifts the film with his presence. However, Kathryn Newton certainly matches him all the way and switches from teenage angst to deadened psychopath really well... there’s a lot to enjoy in the performances of this movie. And, of course, the great Bear McCreary’s score is another mini masterpiece. This guy writes compelling music for pretty much all of the films he touches, really helping to glue the edits together with his riffs and elevating the movie to another level... this is top notch stuff.

So, yeah, not much else to say other than, Freaky is a great film I can recommend to most lovers of the comedy horror genre. I do look forward to seeing a sequel at some point (although it would be nice to see Vaughn come back for that, somehow, without giving too much away here). If I had a choice I’d really want to see a third Happy Death Day movie before this one though, or, actually, even a double sequel which ties the two franchises together might be nice. Either way, good movie, worth a watch, give it a go.