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SouthLAnd aces its “Integrity Check”

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If ever there was a show that didn’t need an integrity check, it’s SouthLAnd. No show has ever been more authentic.

And this was one of its most stripped back, brutal episodes.

It started with the photoflash freezeframe voiceover, which was much more to the point than usual: the average street cop in Los Angeles makes $75,000 a year… it’s not enough.

It really isn’t, judging by the hell that our characters have to fight through every week, which sometimes comes from the cases they work, and other times is of their own making. However it occurs, the characters on SouthLAnd get pushed further and harder than those on any other show. It’s f**king brutal, but it’s what makes the greatest dramas.

This week was rough. It had its funny scenes, of course, because this show can be violent and dark and horribly sad and gut-punchingly funny at any given moment, without ever sacrificing its ability to grab you in an emotional choke-hold or make you laugh while it’s doing it. Whether it was Sherman’s “leap of shame” or Dewey’s entirely expected yet so much worse than you expected ranting in front of the documentary crew, Integrity Check brought the raw humor when it wanted to.

It just didn’t want to very often. With this sixth episode, SouthLAnd turned the corner of darkness and pain that it’s been heading towards since the start of the season. You get the feeling things are only going to get more messed up from here.

Ben McKenzie and Shawn Hatosy nailed the disintegration of the trust between them, bringing a raw energy that made their performances more wrenching. Regina King was superlative, as she always is, dealing with Lydia’s temporary return to uniform duty with the almost unbearably visceral physical challenges that involves. But while we might have thought what happened to her was awful, we had no idea what was waiting for us at the end of Cooper’s shift.

Once again, this show reveals just how much of a knife-edge cops walk on, every minute of every day. Anything can happen at any time, and it can be goddamned terrible and come out of nowhere. Michael Cudlitz again stepped up and delivered an Emmy-worthy performance as Cooper found himself suddenly embroiled in a truly horrific and shockingly savage fight to the almost death. It was intensely physical, taking the show’s already extraordinary physicality to a new, transcendently brutal level.

It was breathless television, unbelievable, unwatchable almost, although you couldn’t tear your eyes away.

That’s what SouthLAnd does to you.

It was a great script that took us to that terrible place, penned by SouthLAnd’s master of brutal precision, Jonathan Lisco, with story editing by Chitra Sampath. Lisco brings an emotional scalpel to his stories, flaying characters bare, down to the bone. His scripts are always perfect studies in structure, pace, and ruthless execution. Sampath brings a wonderfully unhinged sense of humor (her “find my friends app” scene in Failure Drill is still one of the greatest comedy moments of the show), and an impeccable sense of controlled chaos coupled with the ability to unleash it at the exact right moment. With Sampath on board, all hell will typically break loose, at the worst moment for our characters. And so it does here.

A script by Lisco demands the greatest of the SouthLAnd directors, Christopher Chulack. While John Wells runs the writers room, it’s Chulack who is on the street, running the other directors, and acting as the guardian of SouthLAnd‘s visual aesthetic. In this, he is ably assisted by the greatest director of photography in film and TV, Jimmy Muro. Between them, Chulack & Muro create masterpieces of depth and motion with the L.A. light and locations. Two particular examples out of many: the reflections of palm trees along the strip mall windows where Cooper and Tang deal with the “cake incident”; the depth of field and rich, endless golden light behind Cooper as the documentary crew film him after he lets the driver with expired registration go.

The episode was full of such moments, and it had a new layer this time round: that of the camera crew filming the cops. This allowed Chulack & Muro to change visual textures and create constantly evolving looks for the episode as they switched between the documentary, and the show’s normal look (which is ultra-heightened, desaturated documentary). It was a fascinating decision to introduce this conceptual and visual layer, and it worked perfectly.

Episodes of SouthLAnd are like the Sistine Chapel of television. Chulack & Muro are artists of the streets. But it’s art that knocks you flat on your ass with its impact. They’re refining their approach with every episode, and Integrity Check represented a new level of beautiful detail, deep light, layers upon complex layers; all of which drove the shocking and visceral moment to moment heart-stopping action, which was front and center throughout. It was, visually, a beautiful & haunting episode. As happens so often, it was a masterclass in framing, composition, lighting, depth and motion.

Let’s face it, SouthLAnd is a show that will wrestle you to the ground and savage you emotionally. It may lull you with the beauty of Los Angeles, the punch of its humor, the soulful camaraderie of its characters, but don’t let it: because it will come for you eventually, and put you through the ringer, leaving you exhausted, drained, shaking.

It’s what you keep coming back for.

Marie Lu: LEGEND

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Legend is one of those books. You know the kind I mean: you can’t turn the pages fast enough, but you just don’t want it to end.

Full of intrigue, thrills, darkness and high-voltage action, Legend is a great YA sci-fi debut for Marie Lu.

Set in a futuristic Los Angeles, the novel begins with Day, a 15 year old criminal on the run. No one knows who he is or what he looks like. He’s an exile, the most wanted person in the Republic. He steals to stay alive, and to help his family. He has skills, and they’ve kept him and his cousin Tess alive. But then one night, while trying to steal medical supplies for his sick brother, he gets chased down by Republic soldiers, and leaves one of them for dead.

That soldier is Metias, brother of June Iparis. June’s also 15 years old, but she’s the opposite of Day in every way: the only person in the Republic to attain a perfect score on their equivalent of SATs (with slightly higher stakes; a low score gets you banished to labor camps, or worse). She’s the prodigal daughter of the new world. Its shining star. And the most dangerous, notorious criminal in the Republic has just killed her brother. June swears revenge, and sets out to track him down.

What follows is a thrilling, shocking and adrenaline-filled ride through the darker side of the crumbling sectors of LA. The book is alternately narrated by Day & June, which makes for a fascinating back & forth as the story develops. Lu does a great job of keeping the story moving hard and fast, finding time along the way to bring us deeper into the characters’ inner worlds. She gives us two young people who are both on the edge in their own way, and getting pushed further over. Both Day & June are driven to make tougher and tougher choices, all the way to an incredibly tense, nail-biting finale.

Throughout, Lu brilliantly conveys character motivations, complex relationships, family lives, politics, and the grimy, gritty setting of her future world. She weaves all her threads into one high-velocity narrative that is gripping, raw and doesn’t let up until the very end.

And even then, it doesn’t let you go. As you finish the final page, you desperately want book two. Lu throws you into the ending at such high speed, with so much story tantalizingly ahead of you, that the idea of waiting to find out what happens next is almost impossible to handle. By all accounts, Legend 2 is finished, and Lu is already writing Legend 3. And in the meantime, it’s no surprise that CBS Films has snapped up the movie rights.

The movie and the sequels can’t get here soon enough.

 

 

 

 

SouthLAnd’s concussion-inducing “Legacy”

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“Just when you think you’ve seen everything… You haven’t.”

As SouthLAnd‘s season 4 reaches its halfway point, there’s no better way to sum up the season — and the show itself — than in these words that Cooper uttered midway through Legacy.

You never know what’s coming; even when you think you know, even when what you thought you knew was going to happen actually happens — because this show will twist and turn and throw you around and hang you over the edge of a building before its done with you.

This is a show that gives you what you want, for sure: escalating, bad-ass banter and busting on each other from Sammy and Ben; Dewey telling his beautifully insane stories; Tang slow-burning beneath her cool exterior; Cooper facing down the idiots and clowns of this world. But you never quite know how it’s going to do it. Sure ,when Cooper pulls over a Smart car for a traffic violation, you know there’s going to be a “hey numbnuts!” somewhere in the driver’s immediate future. But you don’t know what the driver will do: will there be an argument, a fight, shots fired? Will it be sad, brutal, funny (or all three since SouthLAnd likes to operate on those levels simultaneously)?

It’s unknown trouble, 24/7.

Where SouthLAnd thrives is the way it subverts and makes new all of its story beats. Expectations are gloriously met and then even more gloriously f**ked with. You know the guy that Sammy persuades to snitch is gonna get shot for it; but you don’t know the kind of humanity mixed with brutal, bruise-inducing humor that the show will serve up afterwards. You know that the suicidal teen who Cooper saves isn’t done with his mission to die, but you have no idea how the show is going to motor right through that and focus on Cooper’s made-of-steel strength of mind and soul, as conveyed by Michael Cudlitz’s towering, Emmy-worthy performance.

SouthLAnd hides its emotional sledgehammers in the quietest of moments. The final few minutes of the show were all about Cudlitz’s eyes, his subtlety, his frankly extraordinary ability to convey powerhouse feelings in the most nuanced of movements. The way he handled the news of the teen’s fate was jaw-droppingly great. Not a surprise to anyone who’s seen the show before, but painfully intense and powerful.

That’s just how SouthLAnd rolls.

This was a monster of an episode, written by Heather Zuhlke, who turned in a script that was emotionally sophisticated and relentless, was the funniest in the show’s history, and also clocked up what might be the highest number of bleeps heard on the show to date. Zuhlke knows how to make us cry and laugh, and she can swear like a m**therf**ker. These are all great qualities in a screenwriter. She delivered on raw, hardcore drama and an almost vicious, savage humor that was woven seamlessly into the high-impact, concussion-inducing emotional power of her stories.

Like Cheo Coker’s scripts, Zuhlke’s Legacy was essentially constructed from killer one-liners that zinged with percussive force and velocity. There were far too many to quote: my personal favorite was Lydia’s “I’m hormonal and I’ve got a gun… don’t mess with me.”

Zuhlke’s words were brought vividly to life by this week’s director, The Legendary Jimmy Muro. He shot the show with a distinctive aesthetic you could think of as “shotguns and palm trees.” Everything was harsher and more beautiful. His camera found unusual angles, peering through the dense architecture of the city, seeing L.A. in deep, burnished gold and rich, dark shadows. His images are always so complex and layered, with such depth, even as we focus on the immediacy of the action. Hell, even when it rained he made it look great. Muro has a long and distinguished history with a camera (he shot Heat, L.A. Confidential, Titanic, and Collateral, amongst many others), and he’s the perfect lenser for this show.

Everyone involved in this show is operating at the height of their powers, and it’s thrilling to experience.

Based on the escalating nature of episodes 1-5, and the story arcs that have been set up (revving, gunning their engines, ready to explode), it seems pretty clear that episodes 6 through 10 are going to blow our minds. It’s going to be a crazy, intense, emotionally exhausting ride; but we love it.

This is what we want from SouthLAnd, and this it was it gives us, and then some. We think we know how awesome it’s going to be, but we don’t. Because SouthLAnd always goes way beyond our already heightened expectations.

Every time.

SouthLAnd “Identity”: The Land Of The Blue

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Let’s cut to the chase, SouthLAnd style: Identity was a classic, hardcore episode, firing off staggering levels of raw emotion and dark humor. It was vintage SouthLAnd, doing what this show does best: not so much tugging at your heartstrings as grabbing them with both hands and yanking on them for an hour. It was ruthless, brutal, savagely funny, full of heart and heartbreak.

And it was thanks to two extraordinary women: Sara Gran & Regina King.

Let’s start with Sara Gran’s fantastic script.

Damn.

This was powerful writing, surging & supercharged with overflowing, overwhelming emotions, conveyed with absolute control and unflinching discipline. Any of the scenes in this script could have gone one beat too far, overplayed their hand, spelled it out: not a single one of them did. This was an hour of TV that raced past thanks to the furious pace and deadly precision of the script’s construction. And Identity was one of SouthLAnd‘s most nakedly raw and emotional episodes, up there with Code 4 and What Makes Sammy Run.

If our hearts have pressure points, Sara Gran found them and applied maximum force, leaving us breathless and reeling.

In this she was ably assisted by the queen of understated power, the undisputed heavyweight champion of high-intensity forcefield presence, Regina King. The episode was all about her discovering that she was pregnant, and working out what the hell she was going to do about it. Sara Gran’s script gave King plenty to work with; it was beautiful how much the detectives’ case told us about exactly what Lydia was going through. The stories are always supposed to be about the emotional impact on the detectives, and this was an A+ example.

Not only did the arc of the mother protecting her child deliver an extreme amount of heartache, Lydia’s reaction to it all as she processed the full implications of what being a mother would mean was incredibly moving. When Lydia was surprised that a mother would even admit to murder to protect her child, to which Ruben said, “admit to murder, commit murder; there’s nothing you won’t do,” King’s reaction was nothing short of amazing. Her deeply expressive eyes showed us Lydia’s conflicted soul, her tormented heart, her life about to change forever. This is something few can do; King makes it business as usual.

Give this woman an Emmy already.

It wasn’t all about the heartache though. One of SouthLAnd‘s key strengths is its ability to veer from darkness to light and back, turning on a dime, often mid-scene, often mid-sentence. It’s so human that way; the rawness of laughter in the face of darkness, a necessary survival mechanism in drama as well as life.

To put it more bluntly: SouthLAnd is damn funny. It can make you cry, gasp in horror, and laugh, in the same scene, even in the same beat. Sara Gran was exemplary here: the humor was roughly dispensed and brilliantly played by the actors, with Sammy and Ben’s stories in particular bringing out raucous laughter amidst the sadness of it all. Although, that said, the argument about whose jurisdiction the body parts were in was the perfect summation of SouthLAnd‘s sense of humor: so dark, yet you can’t stop laughing. It’s like Louis CK is in the writers room telling them they’ve gone too far, and they’re just laughing at him and making it even darker.

I’d like to give a special shout out to the day players in this episode. The protective mother, Melanie, and homeless former Marine Tom Smith were played with devastating truth and soul. Smith’s scenes in particular were almost impossible to watch and to bear, so absolutely heartbreaking was the way the actor played them.

Director Nelson McCormick and DOP Cameron Duncan lit and framed these scenes with a beautiful starkness, proving that oftentimes, the more minimal it gets, the more it hurts.

That’s SouthLAnd‘s MO. As the opening voiceover said, some days the trying works better than others. Even on a slow day in the SouthLAnd, this show will still grab you by the scruff of the neck and drag you ruthlessly through its streets. On a day like this one, it will grab your heart and never let go.

Random observations:

  • By the way, can anyone on this show prowl around a scene like Shawn Hatosy? Anyone? I don’t think so. If Michael Cudlitz has practically trademarked “the stance” (as SouthLAnd superfan & supporter extraordinaire @bluegrassbabe3 has accurately pointed out via Twitter), then surely Hatosy has owned “the prowl”?
  • Ben McKenzie’s face when he was performing CPR on the kid from the swimming pool: raw, broken, angry, hopeful. Fantastic acting.

Daughter Of Smoke And Bone: Love makes magical creatures of us all… AKA… love will f**k you up

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To read Laini Taylor’s beautifully written Daughter Of Smoke And Bone is to be lost in a mesmerizing haze that bewitches your mind and your senses, your heart and your soul, with a visceral magic that is utterly rare.

It’s a YA novel of depth, complexity, violence, darkness, loss, lust and all-consuming love, told with a hypnotic but forceful poetry; it lulls, savages, rages and dreams, as it spins its rich, riveting tale of other worlds in collision with our own.

The narrative centers on a girl named Karou, who has bright blue hair, startling tattoos on her palms, and an extraordinary talent both for drawing, and for being mysterious. She lives in Prague, a city which lives and breathes mysteries and beauty in its light and its architecture even at its most ordinary of moments. In this novel, those moments are rare; for Karou, the city is charged with otherworldiness, things not quite as they might seem, a constant gothic murmur that speaks of ancient folklore.

But Karou is in high school, and the novel sets its “baroque contemporary” tone by opening with some priceless awkwardness as she realizes that the nude model in her life-drawing class is her irritating ex-boyfriend, who so recently broke her heart. In many ways, yes, she’s a teen, with teenage problems and anxieties (homework, boys). There’s just one slight difference; she has magical powers and lives with demons.

That is merely the most surface of details in a novel that steadily, unstoppably fills your head with a dizzying myriad of extraordinary details, like thousands upon thousands of beautifully rendered filigrees in a vast cathedral of stories and worlds. It’s a stunning, breathtaking, at times almost overwhelming experience. A love story is set against a centuries-old war between otherworldly beings; simply referring to them as angels and demons doesn’t do justice to the brutal psychological and emotional clarity of Taylor’s writing. She’s created more than just a world; she’s willed into existence a panoply of beings, religions, creation stories and battles for survival. It’s as though Taylor is channeling hardcore and profound myths from the deepest levels of the collective unconscious, in a manner that leaves the reader reeling. It has a similar impact to Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story, leaving you resonating with deeper truths about storytelling and being human; leaving you dreaming furiously.

It’s not just Taylor’s writing, which attains the unusual, hypnotic and stormy cadences and tones of poetry and myth; and not just her perfectly observed, wonderfully nuanced and entrancing characters; it’s her sheer storytelling skills and chops. It’s one thing coming up with a brilliant story; quite another to tell it brilliantly. Most writers are lucky if they can do one of those things. Taylor does both, effortlessly, seamlessly. This is fiction that makes you forget it’s fiction, a book that makes you forget pages are being turned. She knows how to unfold a story, when to deploy information and revelation, how to hook you and draw you in deep.

In short, this is magic of the highest order, spellbinding fiction that absolutely defies any surface categorization of angels, demons, “urban fantasy”, love story… it’s something else; a new magic.

Rating: five out of five spooky tattoos.