It’s a genre I take a special interest in, though I’d be hard pressed to say why it hits my sweet spot so directly. If you get a thrill from this kind of immersive trip into the cracks between still and moving pictures (especially when it’s in service of a radical reimagining of cop/noir/pulp fictions), then you’ve got 12 hours, 57½ more minutes ahead of you. This plays under a sinister electronic pulse and a neon-on-black color scheme so perfectly composed and deeply saturated it feels like Coppola rebuilt Northeast L.A.’s finest taquerias and auto body shops on his One from the Heart soundstage. ![]() Two shots and another 90 seconds later, we get a glimpse of a menacing stranger looking back at them and a sense of their spatial relationships. ![]() In fact, the very first shot lasts more than a minute, as it pans past a mural to reveal a pair of silent, motionless cops looking into the distance. On the one hand, the shots and sequences rolled out at such a hypnotically slow and deliberate pace that it seemed to rewire my brainwave frequency. Thirteen hours have never been deployed this tactically at the level of both the scene and the entire project. She’s one of many masters that Martin (Miles Teller), our main character (certainly no “hero”), finds himself serving in a riff on Los Angeles noir that’s at once extended and abstracted, depressingly nihilistic and ecstatically beautiful.īut the thing that really got me about Too Old to Die Young was its sense of time. That command, given as a charity, comes from Jena Malone’s Diana (a social worker when not directing the murder of all sorts of bad men), who also seems to be receiving messages from … are they aliens? Machine elves? It gets fairly abstract in points. The confrontation that ensues is a reimagining of the climax of Zabriskie Point as channeled through Exterminator 2. Likewise, the astonishing sequence when Viggo (John Hawkes), the show’s sad-eyed vigilante (desperate for a fix of extralegal justice) is directed at a trailer park full of sex criminals, at least as much to soothe his overheated emotions as to make the world a better place. There are moments featuring James Urbaniak’s vile pornographer Stevie that you wouldn’t want to be caught laughing at in public. ![]() I’d always watch Too Old to Die Young alone at night, after the family had gone to sleep, locking into the tempo of Cliff Martinez’s pulsating electronic soundtrack on headphones, silently mouthing “OH MY GOD” when an hour or two of glacially building suspense would explode without warning into truly grotesque and disturbing carnage. Maybe Amazon was inspired by the way Harmony Korine talked about releasing Trash Humpers by dropping unlabelled VHS tapes into garbage cans expressly for the kind of people who would fish them out, driven by sheer curiosity. It would have been impossible for me to find if I hadn’t known to search for it by name, painstakingly typing in “T-o-o-o-l-d-t-o-d-i-e-y-o-u-”ĭespite its pedigree and production value, its strong cast and high-fashion polish, this show wasn’t prestige-prestige like a coffee table book of Annie Leibovitz photos – at its black heart, this was a behind-the-counter item, and like one, you had to ask it for it by name while looking over your shoulder to make sure nobody could hear you. Last year saw the debut of a 10-episode, 13-hour season of prestige television, created by a team of celebrated filmmakers working at the height of their powers with what can only be imagined was absolute creative freedom and a massive budget, and it was promptly released straight to oblivion.
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