Horace and Pete

Started by Drenk, January 30, 2016, 10:38:40 AM

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JG

wow, this show is doing its thing. can't wait till everyone gets hip to it.


03

breakdown of the aforementioned podcast, i dont normally do this, so be appreciative:
5:12 actual beginning
14:40 mike leigh discussion
18:00 cinematography stuff
20:30 one scene episodes
24:00 steve buscemi conversation
25:00 "and i said 'i think maybe you're my brother'"
28:15 "the voices are very fucking real to me"
32;10 casting
34:55 mcsorleys on 7th st being a family bar since the 1800s
37:13 edie falco and jessica lange getting on board. joe pesci saying cigarettes are a lie.
40:00 jack nicholson sitting under a tree reading a book
1:10:00 finale+

matt35mm

Great interview. But don't listen until you've watched the whole show.

I can't overstate how much I love this show.

Drenk

This podcast killed me. It made me cry. That show is incredible. And it's great to hear how important it is for C.K.
Ascension.

Reel

I've had the watch the finale 3 times for that scene of Pete's last entrance again. He looks the worst he has on the entirety of the show and also the happiest he's ever been. I like that Louie lets us fill in the blanks on WTF he was up to when he was missing. From his appearance, you'd imagine him to be like any other crazy person talking to themselves on the street, but the Cop tells Horace there's been absolutely No sign of him, and they have to assume he's dead. So, I picture him deep in the subway tunnels living with the rats. The worst visions of hell are surrounding him and he has to extract himself from society so he doesn't hurt anyone. That's where my imagination wanders to, at least. Then, with Horace meeting this bubbly new bartender candidate and the music swelling at his arrival you're just like "No, this is too perfect. It can't end well." The look on his face is like he's a completely different person, but something in his bones is telling him he belongs in this place. So, he physically feels welcomed home, but in his mind all he can see are red haired demons coming at him. From his arms being folded, the first time I assumed he was hiding a knife and the murder was premeditated. On my last viewing, I noticed that he swipes it from the bar. It kind of consoles me to think that Pete didn't have anything out for Horace or felt abandoned by him because he really was trying to do everything he could to keep him safe. In the flashback sequence when Pete gets beaten by Horace sr. it seems to reveal how very commonplace psychological issues like OCD could be exacerbated into something so much worse by how they were 'dealt with' in those times. For all of the visions he was having, I have to imagine that Pete went on to do tons of Hallucinogens to self medicate the problem, and wasn't prescribed anything until much later in life. It just so happened that when he went off them for that prolonged period, the guy who came up to hug him looked exactly like the man who once beat him mercilessly for filling glasses of water.

Just Withnail

This show blew me the fuck away.

I wrote a blog-post about it on my site:

Horace, Pete, and Time

One of the strongest things I felt watching Louis CK's fantastic show Horace & Pete was the intensity of time passing. Time making itself brutally felt in a variety of ways: slow-moving, or moving all too fast, showing itself welded to the core of the characters and showing itself through the overall structure.

In some of the main characters and most of the supporting characters, in true sitcom style, time seems to stand still. These are mostly static characters, mostly changeless. The sitcom cuteness of characters never changing (because we don't really want them to) is exchanged here with characters who are brutally and self-destructedly stuck in their ways. A habit, even destructive ones, still gives a comfort because you recognize it as part of yourself, as they rhythmically mark otherwise chaotic time and give a known structure to days. The loss of a habit can be extremely frightening, and these characters hang on to theirs with clenched fists. Horace & Pete might be the world's first sit-trag(edy). "Return next week to see your favorite characters still stuck in their ruin!"

Until, suddenly, they're not.

At least twice the show catches you completely off-guard with a brutal ellipsis, as an extremely important dramatic event happens between episodes. These events are referred to only indirectly for the first few minutes, leaving the viewer feeling as if she's missed something, not being primed for the new extremity of the situation, feeling as if the rug has been pulled under her. Suddenly things are different. There's no emotional gradient, no gradual getting used to things, just an implicit order to get used to it.

But the show is also extremely generous with time. Just as much at it is about what and how time takes away, it is a show that fights against time by affording focus on characters, letting them speak and explain themselves. The monologue here becomes a way of generously offering time to a person. Horace & Pete tells us to slow down and listen to this person that is speaking. That could mean listening uninterrupted to a monologue for seven minutes, or the following conversation for forty-five minutes, but that is the least the characters deserve. This show is a goddamned good listener. One of the most striking moments of all the episodes comes when somebody we've never met before is shrugged off by a central character, and who then proceeds to demand her and our focus and time, and deliver an incredibly heartfelt monologue, explaining himself and his motives.

One the flip side of this we have Uncle Pete, who explains himself quite a lot, but who just seems more and more bizarre the more he talks. Time is built into the fabric of his being, but not our time. He is utterly anachronistic, and his ossified views are not just relics from a time that has mostly past, but they also have an extreme strangeness and surreality to them, that seems like a metaphorical way of saying that we are forever cut off from the past. A representative of the previous generation, his alien behavior often feels more as if he'd been beamed in from hundreds of years back.

In the background lies time on a bigger scale: the handing down of the pub through the generations of Horaces and Petes, and tradition threatened by gentrification. Though Horace and Pete cling to the traditions of their pub, there's a sense of an impending doom just outside the doors, made all the more ominous by us never actually seeing the outside, but only getting an indirect image of it through the "authenticity"-seeking hipsters who come in and wonder at the quaintness of the place. Destruction-through-gentrification is an immediate threat, that is brought up and fought against throughout the show, but it also hints at the greater threat that lies at the core of the it: that though this place might survive a little longer, nothing, in the long run, will.

In the meantime it might be comforting to give your time to somebody's stories.

Alexandro

SPOILERS ABOUT THE ENDING


Other thing someone mentioned in a (yeah I know) IMDB board is that Edie Falco also does her part in the tragic events, since in her attempts to "kill" the old bar by serving different drinks and consequently, slicing limes and stuff for martinis and whatnot, she inadvertently enabled the knife for Pete to take, a weapon that normally wouldn't be there.

All in all, this was an absolute gift from Louis CK to us. Buscemi I think gives one of his best performances. He was particularly impressive while playing Pete senior in the flashback.

ono

I finally got around to watching this (it's on Hulu now!).  So good.  I like the part where the ending is foreshadowed by the old man coming into the bar having just been released from prison, explaining how he got there.

This is like Louie's sixth season that we never got.  You could see how he got there with the episodic nature of it all.  I want to see Louie make a movie, though he kind of has many times over with the last two seasons of Louie, and now this.

This will just get better with repeated viewings, as you can now put into more context some of the other conversations where you weren't quite sure of their relevance.