#so it's not like watching sports night is off brand starsky and hutch

[thepucegoose]

it’s fundamentally so funny to me that after a year of not finding anything as good as starsky and hutch to devote all thoughts/time/attention/love/affection to i ended up watching sports night like oh i get it you just want that traumatised adhd bisexual jewish new yorker with a dead close relative whose sudden and traumatic death he erroneously feels responsible for and who’s in love with his best friend the repressed minnesotan who is also in love back and they’ve had ten years as coworkers and best friends in a very intense and codependent partnership in a high pressure work environment and there’s so much repressed sexual tension and internalised homophobia and biphobia to process and work through as well as fraught and difficult relationships to masculinity further perpetuated by their jobs and sexualities and also if they were to be together and discovered they would lose their jobs and entire way of life in a very high profile fall from grace and this adds further tension and heartbreak to their relationship and their relationship is so messed up through this repression that it really has the capacity to fuck them and their relationship and their lives up and there’s big “it’s not gay if...” vibes and also the minnesotan was married to a somewhat cold and unsympathetic wife for a fair portion of these ten years but heaven knows he was in love with his best friend for this lol so who can blame her tbh and god they can be such jerks but their actions are so painfully understandable given the context of their situation and also there’s canonical basis for fics where they’re dads and also where they have complicated and difficult relationships to their own dads and their relationship together is so caught up in their jobs and this is Unhealthy but they can’t imagine not working together and their workplace is like a family with love and support and a very strong father figure boss who takes no shit but loves these boys and there are a lot of good excuses for roadtrips and crappy shared motel rooms and there’s some fun lampshading in the show where they do acknoweldge that their relationship could v easily be seen to be vaguelly gay lol and maybe one of them is deep in the repression and using heterosexual relationships to reaffirm his sense of identity in the face of his feelings for his partner and best friend and he’s earnest and sweet and so So dumb and maybe the other is more conscious of his feelings for the other and has resigned himself to long term pining and trying to distract himself by serially dating women and he struggles with his mental health and burnout and this all culminates in a big fucked up act of self sabotage where he hurts the other as bad as he can in a rash and impulsive but probably forseeable act that represents the undercurrent tensions in their relationship throughout the show and like, maybe they’ve been fucking this whole time but still persuing relationships with women or maybe they’ve always known what was between them but just recognised and understood that they couldn’t risk acting on it and maybe that’s never even said it’s just known and unacknowledged and left as a bittersweet thing that can never be or maybe they once did act on it ( in minnesota) and then agreed that it couldn’t happen again or maybe they know they’re in love but think it’s unrequited or maybe they haven’t even recognised it in themselves yet but like, whatever it is that’s happening it’s fraught and desperate and absolutely heartbreaking like wow okay guess i have a type lol

[celluloidmusings]

In the End, More of the Same

2 out of 5 Stars (because I’m in a good mood)

Anyone who’s read the Robert B. Parker novels about the lovably honorable private investigator, Spenser (with an “s”), will likely suffer irreversible dismay within the first few seconds of Spenser Confidential, Netflix’s shameless misappropriation of the private eye’s namesake. That’s because the latter bears no resemblance to the former.

First off, Parker’s Spenser (with an “s,” in case you’ve forgotten), a former California state trooper turned private investigator, never went to prison. He also never wandered the streets of Boston without any means of gainful employment, which Wahlberg’s character seems to have no trouble in doing. Moreover, Spenser in Netflix world is a crass, knuckle-dragging buffoon, in stark contrast to the Spenser in Parker world, who is cerebral, mild-mannered, honorable. The decision to diverge so completely and unequivocally from the seminal character is both baffling and exasperating. But in all fairness, it is a movie, and unless you’re willing to overlook such trivialities, you’ll likely never fully appreciate the rest of the film’s abject absurdity.

The story opens with Wahlberg recounting in his customary leaden monotone the events that have resulted in his five-year incarceration—a spontaneous beat down of his former boss, Captain Boylan (Michael Gaston), an abusive, corrupt cop who has finally gotten on our antihero’s last evanescent nerve. We then cut to a bespectacled Spenser, clearly wiser for his suffering, sitting in prison, surrounded by fellow ne’er-do-wells whose intentions are as hard to read as the permanent scowls on their faces. A predictable confrontation erupts—because, as we all know, no one likes cops, even bad ones, in prison—leaving Spenser, bloodied and sporting a shank in the kidney, none the worse for the wear (must be the sun salutations he’s been doing in his cell each morning).

Upon his release, he’s harried by cops who clearly have difficulty scaling the Big Blue Wall, and decides his best option is to leave Boston altogether and move to Arizona, where his plans include driving a big rig and contemplating sunsets. But before that can happen—insert totally unexpected plot complication—Spenser becomes embroiled in the sudden murders of his old boss and a young officer working in some vague capacity as an informant for the FBI. The plot thickens like molasses.

Having recently been released from prison for assaulting his superior and subsequently threatened by the entire Boston police department, Spenser decides to put his ambitions to become a truck driver on hold and remain in the city where virtually everyone hates his guts. Naturally. He recruits his former boxing coach, Henry, played by veteran actor Alan Arkin, along with an up-and-coming fighter named Hawk, portrayed with suitable reserve by relative newcomer Winston Duke as a character whose reluctance to get involved in a serious police matter represents the sole instance of common sense in the entire film (spoiler: it doesn’t last). On the periphery, though never out of view, is ex-girlfriend Cilly (played with exuberant abandon by IIiza Schlesinger), an acerbic-tongued bombshell whose life as the long-suffering girl of a guy who can’t control his temper has been derailed. Exactly what that life is is anyone’s guess, though it appears to involve lots of dogs.

Her anger at Spenser is manifest, evinced by an incessant string of insults and a quick romp in the men’s room. Perhaps the writers (Sean O’Keefe and Brian Helgeland) are trying to tell us something profound here about the nature of forgiveness, or horniness, or some such nonsense, or, more likely, simply straddling us with yet another limpid sex scene in the time-honored tradition of Hollywood gratuitous sex. Either way, it’s hardly enough to rescue this disaster of a film from its own folly.

What ensues is a farcical dramedy in the tradition of such memorable gems as Bad Boys, Starsky and Hutch, Tango and Cash, and The Other Guys, another Wahlberg buddy film. The movie’s premise, and, we must assume, its raison d’etre, rests on a highly convoluted, plodding plot involving drug traffickers, mobsters, and of course dirty cops, all looking to get their honest share of the profits from a new casino set to be installed at an old, abandoned dog track known as Wonderland (the title of the Spenser novel by Ace Atkins). The obvious culpability of Spenser’s former partner, Driscoll (played by Bokeem Woodbine), is one of the film’s more subtle attributes, though one can hardly fault screenwriters O’Keefe (Lair, Pursuit Force) and Helgeland (Man on Fire, 42, L.A. Confidential) for including a stereotypical villain in an otherwise stereotypical film. As for Wahlberg, whose acting chops are on prominent display in such worthy films as The Fighter, Invincible, and Boogie Nights, his rote performance here is what we have come to expect from a seemingly overweening infatuation with silly, mindless entertainment: emotionless dialogue, shirtless posturing, and clumsily executed stunts. One wonders if this reflects Wahlberg’s own aesthetic tastes or a dismal lack of quality scripts. Perhaps both.

Despite an experienced and capable ensemble of cast and crew, Spenser Confidential ultimately fails as even a marginally entertaining brand of pure escapism. It does, however, remind us of a nearly universal truth: books are typically better than the movies they inspire, however obliquely. As a book lover myself, might I suggest you skip this hackneyed tale and visit your local library instead and check out a few of Robert Parker’s novels. They’re well worth the trip and, if nothing else, will spare you 111 minutes of wondering why you’re still watching a movie as pointless as this one.