Skip to main content

Too Old To Die Young (2019)

 


"Two Thumbs Down!" said the Siskel & Ebert review of Lost Highway (1997) by noted filmmaker and mindfucker David Lynch, and if ever there was a marketing tack to make me want to see a movie even more, foregrounding the negative reviews from America's Movie Tastemakers was it. After making the drive from Mt. Pleasant to Lansing to see it with my then-girlfriend, I overheard someone say "what the hell was THAT?" in the parking lot as we were leaving, a sentiment that my then-girlfriend echoed once we got into the car. But for me, that movie elicited a Lynch Lifetime Pass, a guarantee from me that whatever he did from that point on would be supported and celebrated and trumpeted, even if it didn't scale the lofty heights of Lost Highway.

In the singular queue of my Lifetime Passes, there are the Platinum members (Lynch, Bowie), and there are the Gold members, for whom I will give the latest project more than a passing glance. Among my current Gold members are Nicolas Winding Refn (for 2011's Drive) and Ed Brubaker, the multiple Eisner-award winning comics writer of Fatale (2012), Velvet (2013), The Fade Out (2014), and Kill or Be Killed (2016), so when it was announced that Refn and Brubaker were going to release a limited series for Amazon Prime called Too Old To Die Young, I was all over it. But while it was released in the summer of 2019 -- all ten "episodes" totaling around 13 hours -- I put it in my queue and let it sit, waiting patiently on deck while I watched other lesser things. It took over a year for me to finally dive in, and after finishing it yesterday, I'm bummed that there will be no more transmissions from that particular universe, no buzzing electronics from Cliff Martinez, no landscapes bathed in blue and red.

Of course, I'm strongly recommending TOTDY, but for the curious, here's some background material for you to consider first. Most of what follows is spoiler-heavy, but I want you to know what to expect, because this show is most certainly not for everyone:


Nicolas Winding Refn Says His New TV Show Is Not A TV Show

A Guide To Understanding -- And Maybe Loving -- Nicolas Winding Refn

Too Old To Die Young: Why It's Not Too Late To Watch

Notes From A "Too Old To Die Young" Completist

And one of my favorite unexpected moments from a series full of them:


If you have even a cursory familiarity with the work of either Refn or Brubaker, it may be enough to know that TOTDY takes the Quaalude pacing and dazzling visuals of Refn and the murky lowlifes and terse dialogue of Brubaker and conjures an uncanny conglomerate of ultraviolence and fascism and masculinity that is entrancing, right down to the last long take. In the hands of lesser artists, TOTDY would have been shaved down to brutal banality easily dismissed and discarded, but it's easily -- EASILY, he said in all caps for emphasis -- the best televisual experience that Amazon Prime has given the world. And it's largely a secret, midnight whispers of depravity and family and the role of the feminine that will most likely cause both your thumbs to start pointing to the ground.

But if you like it, oh, do we have something to talk about. 

TOTDY is available on Amazon Prime wherever Amazon is Primed.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"The Silver Gun" by Robert Palmer (1983)

I mean...Urdu? Seriously, Urdu . On an already eclectic and worldly album -- Pride , from 1983 -- "The Silver Gun" closes a chapter in Robert Palmer's career by singing a song about a horse in a language spoken daily by over 100 million people. The liquid bass line and propulsive electronics set out a bedrock for Palmer to ping phrasings rather out of place in Western music, askew astride even the peripatetic minimalism of the rest of the record. Somehow, in the middle of Michigan's Appalachia, I had this on vinyl a few years before the CD era officially commenced. It was an album of effort -- even the cover, a pointillism-and-bronze work, had Palmer's head barely above the water -- but the stitches didn't show to my pre-adolescent eyes and ears. In a career marked by zigs and zags, Pride and "The Silver Gun" were most certainly Other, and for a kid that felt like he didn't belong much of anywhere, it was nice to have those discrete feeling...
Post a Comment
Read more

Some 2024 Listening Pleasures

It started with a gift of two JBL Control 25 speakers, and by "gift" I mean "borrowed" -- a.k.a. "will never return" -- from an obsolete tech detritus pile at work. I may have snagged more than two gifts, of course, but the raw footage proving such a claim remains elusive. And after installing the JBL speakers into the upper corners of the music room, and after installing speaker stands for the rear speakers I already had, and after making the hard choice between a big-ass bean bag and a comfy leather recliner to properly center myself in the audio field (R.I.P., big-ass bean bag), there was only one missing piece: the Apple TV 4K unit. So for me, 2024 was the year I streamed a lot of music in Atmos through Apple Music, surrounded by new tunes and old bops in thrilling new dimensions. Some might say you don't need surround sound, 'cos the two ears + two speakers modality has been dandy for a while now, but that's like saying you don't need ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Natural's Not In It

  For nearly seven years on the button, Courtney and I lived on Perch Lake, just outside of Gaylord. Right next to Perch Lake was The Natural Golf Course, eighteen holes that twisted and turned through the best nature that the 45th Parallel could offer. The picture above is the view of the first green, and if you left the wooden bridge to the right and briefly ambled through the woods and over a rusted metal fence, you'd get right to our old driveway. Every now and again, an errant golf ball would appear at the edge of our property, like a single egg laid by an itinerant duck. Of the three major elitist sports -- golf, tennis, skiing -- I golfed because the barrier to entry was pretty low and the interest in golf on my Dad's side of the family was high, from playing the sport to watching it on television on the weekends. As spare clubs were abundant and my growth spurt had yet to overwhelm statistical norms, my grandmother would take prepubescent me to the Roscommon driving ran...
Post a Comment
Read more