‘True Detective’ re-up, 
ambitious yet uneventful 

TV REVIEW

Season Two premiere 
offers exposition and 

little action

By MATT BARNAUSKAS

Daily Arts Writer

Last year, “True Detective” 

premiered on HBO and became 
an instant phenomenon. View-
ers 
followed 

detectives Rust 
Cohle (Matthew 
McConaughey, 
“Interstellar”) 
and Marty Hart 
(Woody Harrel-
son, “The Hun-
ger Games”) into 
the backwaters 
of Louisiana and 
a dark world of 
crime, the occult 
and torment unfolded over eight 
episodes. The announcement of 
the show’s continuation as an 
anthology series, with a new cast 
and location, brought simultane-
ous excitement and speculation. 

Following up such a highly 

regarded first season is not an 
enviable task for creator and sole 
writer, Nic Pizzolatto (“The Kill-
ing”). While crafting the series 
as an anthology allows the show 
an opportunity to book big-name 
talent and start fresh each sea-
son, there’s the burden of what 
came before. Because it falls 
under the name “True Detec-
tive,” Season Two needs to fulfill 
an obfuscated obligation to live 
up to what was established in the 
show’s inaugural season while 
carving out it’s own identity as a 
separate entry in the anthology.

While Season One tackled and 

subverted several of the tropes 
that make up the buddy cop 
genre, Season Two approaches 
the classic film noir narrative. 
Trading the bayous of Louisi-
ana for the more traditional noir 
setting of Southern California 
brings forth multiple tales of 
corruption, depression and the 
morally gray that are bound to 
collide.

All these plotlines are estab-

lished in the first episode, “The 
Western Book of the Dead,” but 

unfortunately the story is spread 
so thin between the main charac-
ters that there is a lack of nuance 
that 
prevents 
anyone 
from 

standing out beyond the broad-
est characterization.

There’s 
Ray 
Velcoro 
(Colin 

Farrell, “In Bruges”), a crooked 
detective in the pocket of crimi-
nal Frank Semyon (Vince Vaughn, 
“The Internship”). Ray initially 
stands out the most from this sea-
son’s characters. The man pos-
sesses no control in his life, forced 
to work for Frank while struggling 
to expand his custody for a son, 
Chad (Trevor Larcom, “Fresh Off 
the Boat”), who might not even 
be his. The only consolation Ray 
gets is in the bottle or by violently 
lashing out at those around him. 
However, Ray is driven so quickly 
to the extreme, tracking down 
one of Chad’s bullies and beat-
ing up the boy’s father in front of 
him, it comes to question whether 
this character has any chance of 
being humanly sympathetic.

In contrast, Frank appears to 

be heading down the right path, 
finding a way to go through some 
rail project involving federal 
money that isn’t explained very 
well. The project is “A chance for 
the grandkids to be part of the 
old California families, where 
they don’t even know where the 
money comes from,” Semyon 
claims. Everything is in place, 
until Semyon’s partner in the 
venture goes missing. Vaughn is 
the biggest risk for this season, a 
traditionally comic actor taking 
on a much darker role compared 
to his usual fare. But so far the 
character hasn’t provided enough 

for Vaughn to show whether he 
was the right choice for the job.

The cycle of misery extends 

to all the other characters in 
“True Detective.” Detective Ani 
Bezzerides (Rachel McAdams, 
“Sherlock Holmes”) deals with 
unresolved issues with her cult-
ish father (David Morse, “The 
Hurt Locker”), who may be con-
nected to the disappearance of a 
young woman. McAdams gives 
a solid, stone cold demeanor to 
her character but hopefully she 
is more than just, as her father 
puts it, “An extended criticism 
of my values,” a character who 
purely relies on another to define 
her. Meanwhile, Paul Woodrugh 
(Taylor Kitsch, “Friday Night 
Lights”), a highway patrolman 
on leave, is struggling to adjust 
to civilian life after serving as a 
mercenary in Iraq. 

All these characters sound 

familiar, 
archetypes 
already 

established in some form of film, 
television or literature. Their suc-
cess will come from how “True 
Detective” utilizes and twists 
what has come to be expected of 
these types of people, but right 
now they remain stuck in their 
preordained box.

“True Detective” does a lot to 

lay the groundwork for its ambi-
tious redirection, but by doing 
so much, it feels like very little 
is being done. So when the three 
main law enforcement characters 
finally meet at the end of the epi-
sode only a few steps are taken in 
moving the story forward. Hope-
fully, “True Detective” can soon 
make strides instead of trudging 
through a tale of woe. 

‘Inside’ works 
despite its issues

MOVIE REVIEW

By REBECCA LERNER

Daily Arts Writer

As I walked into my home-

town theater full of screaming 
toddlers and side-eyeing tweens 
on the open-
ing night of 
Pixar’s 
lat-

est 
creation 

“Inside Out”, I 
was genuinely 
excited 
for 

them. Know-
ing that most 
of them would 
soon be going 
through 
the 

same 
rather 

lackluster public school mental 
health education that I did, it 
was calming to know that more 
knowledge on the subject was so 
accessible. 

“Inside Out” is a lively journey 

through the mind of eleven-year 
old Riley (Kaitlyn Dias, “The 
Shifting”). Riley is a happy kid 
from Minnesota, mostly because 
her emotions are controlled by 
a very peppy chief emotion, Joy 
(Amy Poehler, “Parks and Rec-
reation”). Joy is both helped and 
hindered by Riley’s other emo-
tions, Fear (Bill Hader, “The 
Skeleton Twins”), Anger (Lewis 
Black, “The Daily Show”), Dis-
gust (Mindy Kaling, “The Mindy 
Project”) and Sadness (Phyllis 
Smith, “The Office”). The per-
sonifications of her emotions all 
amicably fight over a dashboard 
that directs Riley’s behavior and 
over time create her likable per-
sonality manifested in different 
“islands” — Goofball, Hockey, 
Honesty, Friendship and Family. 

A shift occurs when Riley’s 

mother (Diane Lane, “Man of 
Steel”) and father (Kyle Maclach-
lan, 
“Portlandia”) 
decide 
to 

uproot from Minnesota to San 
Francisco. After a beautiful and 
thankfully shortened road trip, 
the family arrives at a dreary 
apartment and finds their fur-
niture will be days late. To add 
to the stress of the situation, 
Riley’s parents start arguing ... 
and the pizza in San Francisco 
has broccoli on it. While trying 
to calm the other emotions, Joy 
insists on keeping a happy face, 

which means excluding Sadness 
from activity. After an argu-
ment, Joy, Sadness and Riley’s 
core memories are thrown into 
the confusing maze of her long-
term memory. They have to navi-
gate long term memory to try to 
make it back to headquarters, 
where they are urgently needed. 
Without them, Riley cannot feel 
joy or sadness, leaving Disgust, 
Anger and Fear to be her primary 
emotions during stressful events 
such as the first day of a new 
school and hockey tryouts. 

What makes “Inside Out” 

special and deserving of the 
hype is not just its visually stun-
ning animation and the likable 
and funny characters; the film 
changes the formula of children’s 
movies fundamentally with one 
characteristic — it doesn’t have 
a villain. All of the characters, 
even ones that would have been 
easy to denigrate with ulterior 
motives, are actively rooting for 
Riley. Unlike other kid’s movies, 
the viewer has to accept that no 
one is inherently good or bad; the 
world is much more complicated 
than that. 

However, as “Inside Out” so 

articulately demonstrates, there 
is a mix of good and bad in every-
thing — including the movie. 
As the film serves as a supple-
ment to mental health educa-
tion, the representation of body 
types must be addressed. Joy, 
the most conventionally “good” 
and likable character, is tall, 
thin and white. Her counterpart 
is Sadness, who is portrayed as 
blue, overweight and wearing a 
droopy turtleneck and glasses. 
For all its other positivity, the 
film unfortunately connects sad-
ness with fatness and happiness 
with beauty. Pixar can do better 
than feeding into stereotypes 
that children constantly absorb 
from other media sources. 

Despite the issues of body 

image, Pixar has created a 
film that will inspire children 
to consider the importance of 
their own feelings and have 
more consideration for those 
around 
them. 
“Inside 
Out” 

is a humorous and engaging 
reminder to pay attention to the 
voices in our heads.

6

Thursday, June 25, 2015
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
ARTS

A-

True 
Detective

Season 2 
Premiere

HBO

A-

Inside Out

Pixar & 
Walt Disney 
Pictures

Rave 20 & 

Quality 16

COURTESY OF ??????

Smize feat. stache

