Author: remotepossibilities

“Sometimes your worst self is your best self.” Or a one line diagnosis of why True Detective isn’t quite coming together

There is no shortage of attention being paid to True Detective season two. Nearly every media outlet that covers pop culture has run a piece lamenting that the show is not meeting expectations.  So I’ll make this brief.

Vince Vaughn was the actor I was most excited to see this season.  Like the two actors who anchored season one, his background as more of a likable, comedy guy gave him the most runway out in front of him, the greatest amount of raw potential to wring from his performance.  The trailers only confirmed this for me: images of Vaughn leaning into that caustic edge always present even in his comedic persona were cut together with Rachel McAdams seeming fine but unremarkable, Taylor Kitsch looking taut and vaguely crazy-eyed, and Colin Farrell apparently trying to prove that he can act his way out from behind the most ridiculous mustache and western wear combo anyone has been asked to sport outside a Cohen brothers movie.  Yup, I was going to be in it for Vaughn.

Which leads me back to the impetus for this post, as this past Sunday we finally got to see the scene in which perhaps the most memorable of HBO’s True Detective trailer tag-lines occurs: “Sometimes your worst self is your best self.”

Continue reading “Sometimes your worst self is your best self.” Or a one line diagnosis of why True Detective isn’t quite coming together

#TBT Film Rec: Pump Up the Volume

Since Christian Slater has been on my mind and my television this week (see yesterday’s post on USA’s Mr. Robot), I decided to feature him in this week’s throwback film rec.  Many Slater films rushed to mind as candidates, like the early Tarantino screenplay True Romance (1993) or the satire that made Mean Girls (2004) thinkable, Heathers (1988). In the end, I’m going one tick more obscure to 1990’s Pump up the Volume.

Pump Up the Volume was never a huge hit but was well reviewed is still held dear by many.  It comes toward the end of what I’d call the “meaningful-film-for-and-about-teenagers” cycle that includes all of Molly Ringwald’s oeuvre, and, say, the first few tastes of Patrick Dempsey (then the big-nosed, good guy, not McDreamy), Winonna Ryder, and, yes, Christian Slater.

Slater’s Mark is the loner kid at his suburban Phoenix high school.  At night, however, he transforms from the glasses wearing shy guy, to the shirtless, smoking, and swearing underground DJ known as “Hard Harry.”   Continue reading #TBT Film Rec: Pump Up the Volume

Mr. Robot: Domo arigato, USA Network

I saw a commercial for Mr. Robot last week.  Okay, I saw it over and over again  on a loop in the background of Xfinity on demand. In it a young man darts his eyes around  nervously in a subway car, expressing his feeling of paranoia in demeanor as well as voiceover.  Then the tension breaks as a voice inside the car interrupts his inner monologue.  The voice of a decade’s worth of Panasonic commercials and before that the voice of 90s teen misanthropy: the voice of Christian Slater.

I like Christian Slater.  I love Pump Up the Volume.  I even like Kuffs–which was kinda terrible.  I’ve rooted for his previous attempts to jump back onto the A-list with a primetime TV vehicle but here, in this commercial, his presence dashed my hopes for something fresh from USA’s new series Mr. Robot.  Here, decked out in something like a modified 90s grunge look, Slater seemed mostly like an intertextual reference to his former self, a self who would have been cast as the young, paranoid rather than the knowing stranger on the subway car.  

Feeling semi-harangued by this Xfinity commercial, however, I finally gave in and streamed the series pilot.

And it was Really Good. Continue reading Mr. Robot: Domo arigato, USA Network