Louis C.K released a new show. The first episode is one hour long. I'm downloading.
https://louisck.net/show/horace-and-pete
If cinema is a church, this is like a sermon that restores your faith.
Amazing that this happened/is happening the way it's happening.
After having trouble downloading the episode I can say that...
Yes, wow, it really is incredible. All the things you can do with words, actors and just one place...It gives me hope.
fucking Louis CK is the new Eugene O'Neill. whowouldvethought
ep 2 up
edit: i have never wept more openly at a shows beauty than these two episodes. i found myself tearing up attempting to explain to someone the old man and his wife scene from episode one.
Episode 3 is up and is tremendous.
Quote from: matt35mm on February 13, 2016, 03:20:00 PM
Episode 3 is up and is tremendous.
Yes. Absolutely mesmerizing. And terribly moving...
Holy shit. I'm trying my hardest not to be histrionic...this is starting to bring to mind the stuff Bergman and Fassbinder made for television. Laurie Metcalf gives one of the greatest monologue deliveries I've ever seen in episode 3. You could switch her out for Liv Ullman and it couldn't be better. I feel like I've said that a couple times in the past year (Nina Hoss? Evelyne Brochu?) but man there's a lot of good stuff happening right now. I can't get over this episode. I want to say it again: Holy shit.
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FoWEZoNt.jpg&hash=669073fa1c6433ea731796347ebda2f9731f3896)
I tuned out of Louie a couple of years ago, but I love this show. Its my favorite thing I've seen Louis CK do! Wanna know more about Annie Baker's involvement...
Quote from: wilder on February 13, 2016, 09:22:38 PM
Holy shit. I'm trying my hardest not to be histrionic...this is starting to bring to mind the stuff Bergman and Fassbinder made for television. Laurie Metcalf gives one of the greatest monologue deliveries I've ever seen in episode 3. You could switch her out for Liv Ullman and it couldn't be better. I feel like I've said that a couple times in the past year (Nina Hoss? Evelyne Brochu?) but man there's a lot of good stuff happening right now. I can't get over this episode. I want to say it again: Holy shit.
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FoWEZoNt.jpg&hash=669073fa1c6433ea731796347ebda2f9731f3896)
You said it perfectly! I was thinking Bergman, too (how can you not when you see a 9-minute monologue about a strange erotic experience delivered in an uninterrupted close up?).
The fact that Louis C.K. can pull off writing and directing a monologue (and whole episode) that can be as dark, existential, strange and erotic as Bergman while ultimately having a deeply humanist and empathetic view of the situation... is a marvel. How can you get more simultaneously bleak and comforting than the idea that you belong to such a great number of dishonest people that if you had an army of the dishonest wage war on the honest, the dishonest would handily outnumber and defeat the honest?
And, of course, bravo Laurie Metcalf! As capable and captivating as any of Bergman's actresses, but in a more naturalistic key. Masterful!
That was a pretty incredible monologue, I wonder how many times she did that.
This show is like comfort food. It's so deceptively simple and yet so much thought has gone into it. Seeing modern situations like the Tinder date in episode 2 play out in this dated presentation gives it way more poignancy. Everything about the show smells of disdain for the modern world right down to the cameras, yet it's so incredibly thoughtful about it. Alan Alda looks like he's having a blast.
More like "Bore Us To Sleep"!!
Right, gang?
Just felt like saying something absolutely no one agrees with.
I'm finally caught up! I didn't expect everything to be so staged, gives it a feeling of authenticity. When I first heard about the show, I imagined him trying to do some One camera, cinematic type of thing. It really is a treat to be exposed to such a current atmosphere in this theater setting. It's a show that needs to be dissected before you form any final opinion on it. Like, Alan Alda is a hateable old grunt of a character, but we still want to get a further grasp on where he's coming from. It'll be interesting when Louie goes into his backstory later on. Steve Buscemi is obviously the most likable person there, somehow managing to play a more pathetic character than Seymour from 'Ghost World'. And being such a podcast fan, I love his inclusion of lesser known New York comics like Kurt Metzger, Nick Dipaolo, and Mark Normand!! You guys might not know, but they're responsible for some of the most 'edgy' racial comedy out there right now. As digger said, the tone of the show is like a warm blanket. I just want to live in it! I wish I'd never heard about it until the first season was over so I could just watch them all at once!
END OF ACT 1
AAAAAIIIUUUUUGGGGGGHHHH!!!!
I never want this show to end.
wow, this show is doing its thing. can't wait till everyone gets hip to it.
Louis talks Horace and Pete on WTF (http://www.wtfpod.com/podcast/episode-700-pt-1-2-julia-louis-dreyfus-louis-ck)
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+
Great interview. But don't listen until you've watched the whole show.
I can't overstate how much I love this show.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.