Last night I watched some more Deadwood, which has bounced to the top of my addictions list. How serious is it? I’m OUT OF BEER. I have been for multiple days. One scene between Seth (Tim Olyphant) and Alma (the radiant Molly Parker) I pulled a Dru on about fifteen times. The first five times, I just watched Molly. The second five times I just watched Tim. Then I noticed that the light was completely screwed up (when the camera was hard by Molly, there was no natural light except what was reflecting off buildings, and when the camera was hard by Tim, there was tons of natural light) so I watched the scene about another five times to try to figure out if it was a continuity error or whether it was deliberate. I came to the conclusion that it was a continuity error, but it worked with the scene so they left it. Then when I got to the end of the disk I watched again, because it has to be one of the best scenes ever in terms of dialogue and reaction shots. It’s subtle, well scripted, adult and funny as hell.
The guy who plays Swearingen is a Machiavellian menace / Disney sappiness combo that continues to astound. He gets multiple lines in every show that most actors would kill to get once, and when he gets the Gimp to fetch him a new brush to get the bloodstains off the floor I sat with my mouth hanging open, trying to figure what the hell would motivate him to do something so demeaning. When I figured out his motivation I left my jaw to dangle.
Pulling a Dru, by the way, is from the second season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Dru watches somebody get fried and she says, “Do it AGAIN! Do it AGAIN!” in a particularly childlike way.
Time to get going on the day.
I’ve had 123 views on the Tapioca Song. I actually ran into Dances with Sheep in the parking lot the other morning and he said, “I was humming it in the car” and I said, “Yeah, try being the poor woman who wrote it.” Because when I get the Tapioca Song stuck in my head, it’s because I’m working out a mass arrangement for Chor Leoni. Grandiose…. Foolish…. and entirely unpreventable.
You ALMOST tempt me. But no, I’ll stick with Fred Astaire, as suggested, and also a ripoff of It Happened One night starring Bette Davis and James Cagney. We have been delving for movies with Bette Davis in which she plays a sympathetic character. In last night’s, The Bride Came COD, she wasn’t sympathetic, but at least, according to Loki, she was a character he didn’t hate.
But back to Deadwood. I think my problem with it would be not the language and so forth, but the effectiveness with which it demolishes the Old West legends – legends of which I partook as a child through Zane Grey and William McLeod Raine – epitomes both of a profound and unrealistic innocence. (The fact that I was living on a cattle ranch at the time was neither here nor there.)
If I may special plead, yet again, for Deadwood, Seth Bullock is a man whose uprightness and honesty gets him in trouble over and over again. He’s the apotheosis of western goodguyness. And he was a buddy of Teddy Roosevelt’s.
He’s definitely represented as being an over the top good guy in Deadwood, much the same as Swearingen is an over the top baddie.
And cute. Did I mention that he’s cute?