I think he was trying to respond to my earlier post, but didn’t understand how to do the ‘quote’ thing.
I got that but, other than what you wrote, it all looks like something assembled to fool a spam filter.
I only made it halfway through the episode before falling asleep (not because of the show) but the only thing that will keep me watching at this point is Ted Levine - is he intended to be a major character?
Probably not.
Maybe it’s because I’m not familiar with Deadwood, which seems to have spoiled some of you for westerns, but I liked it.
Yes, there were some plot problems - Bohannon hanging out in the confessional hoping that his victim would show up was the most glaring - but I thought it was fun in spite of it. I’ll probably keep watching.
I got thrown by Ted Levine. I kept looking at him and saying “who is that”, “I know him from somewhere”. It drove me crazy till I checked out the show on IMDB and realized that it was Captain Leland Stottlemeyer from Monk.
I thought it was pretty weak acting and directing all around… and the writing is nowhere as rich as Deadwood. Maybe a “c”.
[QUOTE=davidm]
I got thrown by Ted Levine. I kept looking at him and saying “who is that”, “I know him from somewhere”. It drove me crazy till I checked out the show on IMDB and realized that it was Captain Leland Stottlemeyer from Monk.
[/QUOTE]
And Buffalo Bill (the “do you wanna f*ck me?” serial killer) from Silence of the Lambs.
I won’t spoiler since it’s my own WAG: do you think the sergeant will turn out to be the preacher?
Interestingly, the preacher is played by the Red Dragon killer in the original Hannibal Lector movie “Manhunter” (not the Edward Norton remake “Red Dragon”), just to tie in the two serial killers associated with the Lector character.
I wonder where they found the locomotive. Wrong type to be P&AC #3, which had been used in High Noon, “Little House on the Prairie”, “Petticoat Junction”, Back to the Future Part 3, and a bunch of other things.
That bothered me too. Maybe he went in and tried to confess every day at the same time.
This bums me out. I would have hoped that they’d do better with the history. Maybe he made that stuff up to throw off One Hand.
Then again, maybe I shouldn’t be making excuses. On reflection this morning, I am not as impressed as I was after the first viewing. I’ll give it at least one more try.
Yeah, I was thinking “Now they’re going to have to bring in Ralph Fiennes at some point.”
I’m guessing any similarities between the real man and his fictional counterpart are coincidental, but Colm Meaney’s character, Thomas Durant, is a historical figure.
Everytime I see Common, he pulls me right out of the story. What a poor and unbelievable actor.
They may as well have put Wesley Snipes into that role. His 21st century black 'tude is out of place in 1865. Also, everybody in this thing is way too clean.
Well, I’m pretty sure he was trying to channel Denzel Washington in Glory (speaking of Western/Civil War movie cliches). But he just doesn’t have those acting chops… nowhere near. Mostly, though, I think this is a case of bad directing going on here and he/she is not getting the right performance out of his actors. The whole thing just has a disjointed non00chemistry vibe.
Also, my expectations have been enhancedm and I suppose I expect better from AMC, what with Breaking Bad and The walking Dead… I guess they all can’t be homeruns.
I don’t know, that t’baccy chewing whore had a nice crust, and the large bruise or hicky on her tit was disconcerting.
But really that’s just an example of another cliche, that this show is rife with.
Another historical nitpick: Ted Levine said he was a Copperhead (i.e. pro-southern northerner) before the war but that he was conscripted into service. Again, his character might have been lying, but the character is obviously way over 40 (Levine is 54), nobody over the age of 35 was conscripted into service in the U.S. armies, and only a very minor percent of those were conscripted- most were volunteers.
A man of 45 or 50 could certainly have joined the U.S. Army, and he might have even been a paid substitute, but the odds are tiny if at all extant that he would have served against his will at that age. (Even the Confederacy, which was desperate for soldiers, stopped conscription at 45.)
Also, Levine’s character and the guy killed in the confessional in the opening both said they took did terrible things on Sherman’s March. The main character’s wife was killed in Meridian, Mississippi. While it’s certainly possible they served at Meridian with Sherman and were later on his march and did really bad rude things during both, the Meridian Campaign and ‘The March’ were two very different events that happened several months apart (Meridian in Feb. '64, then the Atlanta Campaign through that summer, then the March from Nov.'64 through the spring of '65).
The implication was that the men considered Meridian a part of Sherman’s March, which it wasn’t and even those who were veterans of both would not have considered them the same thing. Meridian was a regular military campaign and “The March” was in many ways a whole new form of warfare that involved going off the grid/living off the land/deliberately inflicting terror on civilians/etc…
French kissing the consumptive was mentioned earlier. Wouldn’t that make her damned near as good as consumptive herself? TB, especially then, was not only highly contagious (even my parents, born two generations after the war, remembered when houses that once had owners with TB sold for a fraction of similar houses- some lower class houses were torn down altogether because the land was worth more without the dwelling) but a man with consumption would have known it and probably prevented a woman he loved from kissing him to protect her.
Another propaganda of the politically correct type that the civil war was fought over slavery. Slavery was certainly an issue of civil war but not the factotum nor pure reason, no matter how we choose our history in modern context.