TRUE DETECTIVE: NIGHT COUNTRY (2024)

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(****+ / *****) :: Brilliant return to form (though I'm not among the legion that loathed season two, I can't remember much of anything about season three, other than Mahershala Ali being, unsurprisingly, excellent) courtesy of a director whose work I now need to devour. Should the series continue, would love to see it take the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE pre-McQuarrie route, a different writer/director taking a swing at a season/series (Barry Jenkins, Sam Taylor-Johnson, Lynne Ramsay, Jordan Peele, and Werner Herzog (see: BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL – NEW ORLEANS, great underrated film) being the first that spring to mind; would've included Jane Campion but she did it with TOP OF THE LAKE and Nicolas Winding-Refn but same with TOO OLD TO DIE YOUNG and COPENHAGEN COWBOY). Will miss seeing the Ennisians on our Sunday night visit – I would've gladly spent the remainder of the long night with them (hanging with Rose would be brilliant) – but I'll especially miss Danvers's latest weekly variation on "fuck." Corpsicle FTW.

corpsicle

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Fantastic read via Polygon on how Issa López and crew made the show’s already-legendary ice-rink thawing corpsicle. Found this bit, on the influences behind it, of particular interest:

Among the influences they ultimately pulled in: 

  • “A shrunken head where the skin has started to pull back and reveal this mouth that’s been dislocated or disjointed” (a work by Phil Hale, a López suggestion)
  • Berlinde De Bruyckere, a Belgian artist who sculpts “really violent sections that you have cutaways through, and you can see this kind of skin draped and stretched, and you’re not quite sure whether it’s part of a body you’re looking at” 
  • Ringu — specifically “a reveal where they open a cupboard” (if you know, you know) 
  • The eternal anguish of Francis Bacon (the painter, not the lord chancellor of Britain)
  • A photograph of a baroque underwater dance to lend the whole thing a “sense of movement,” as if this pile of bodies was merely paused in panic."