Luck: Season One (2012)

Showrunners: David Milch and Michael Mann

 The death of a few horses behind the scenes led to the eventual cancellation of this show. This cancellation was unfortunate but also very appropriate considering how much this show adored horses. It's about a bunch of people who come together at this horse track because of their admiration and love for horses. Whether or not they are contradicting themselves by being at a race track and also loving horses is not the issue, but it is clear that the makers of this show and the characters are all big horse lovers.

Luck is filled with characters who try so hard not to show any weakness or sentimentality, but it is always the scenes where people are interacting with horses in which emotion, sentimentality, and tenderness come through. This poeticism that comes through is a result of David Milch's great dialogue and Michael Mann's amazing visual eye. I'm not sure if I've ever seen a show better than this from the standpoint of a sensory experience. It proves television does not have to be writer-centric forever, the show is filled with cinematic, visceral, and poetic moments that make sense internally even if they don't always make sense plot-wise. The story can be confusing, it's big, complex and filled with race track vocabulary that made it even more difficult to understand what was going on. This should have been more frustrating, but the show always knew how to make you feel what you need to feel. Like Milch's best show, Deadwood, I suspect the show would have been even better in the second season, maybe all-time great television level, but unfortunately we'll never get to see it happen.

Grade: A-

Filmcap: The week of Oct 2-9

Bunuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, von Trier's Europa, and the final season of Deadwood all feature in this post. Yes it's been a long while since my last one, and I am good awfully behind, but I am determined to keep it going. Quite a large variety of stuff in this one. It includes a couple of television documentaries about history and also the culmination of a series that almost serves as the history of society. The Deadwood post is possibly the longest in this blogs history, maybe being second only to The Tree of Life post. 

Filmcap: The week of Aug 28-Sept 4

Beginners, The Limey, and the second season of Deadwood are in store for this post. A television show that shows us the beginnings of our society, a movie that shows how the beginnings are always the best, and then a movie in which you can't always tell what is the beginning and what is the ending.

Filmcap: The week of June 19-26

This is called a filmcap, but this week it's a TVcap. I review four television seasons that either had season finales or I finished myself in this week. I give my input into the first critically-panned AMC show, rave about a show more about community than "Community", compare a fantasy show to the Arab Spring, and talk about why comedies have a harder time being good than dramas.

(I was out of the country for about two and a half weeks hence the lateness for this post and the reason no posts were published in the last few weeks. I watched minimal films in the weeks after this post and so I'll probably be getting more posts up in the next couple weeks before school starts at a more hurried pace than normal, which will hopefully make up for the lost time).