Synopsis
A bracing preview of television's future
The owners of a dive bar in Brooklyn, Horace and Pete, along with bar regulars share their experiences and lives with each other while drinking or working at the bar.
2016 Directed by Louis C.K.
The owners of a dive bar in Brooklyn, Horace and Pete, along with bar regulars share their experiences and lives with each other while drinking or working at the bar.
百年酒館, Хорас и Пит, 百年酒馆, הוראס ופיט
honestly? maybe the best mini-series written since Scenes from a Marriage in 1973. like holy fucking shit.
"Kathy, I'm lost," I said, though I knew she was sleeping
I'm empty and aching and I don't know why
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike
They've all come to look for America"
—Simon and Garfunkel
emotionally relentless classical television (like an existential nightmare take on Cheers), and a powerful depiction of american domestic traditions as poisonous, self-defeating prophecies of misery. particularly moving is the way its use of traditional, multi-camera/stage formal elements simultaneously captures the emotional immediacy of its characters and their larger stagnation, as ultimately this is one of the finest portraits of the abuse inherent in maintaining the status quo, and the tragic ease with which it is internalized.
The sad face of a clown.
An anguished whimper.
A moving portrait of awkwardness.
Realizing your mistakes never go away.
Horace and Pete.
Over the next couple days, I’ve been watching and reviewing a few of my grandfathers movies and giving my insight and commentary on them. The last movie I reviewed was Marriage Story which you can click here to read.
Horace & Pete was a secret project conducted by Louis C.K. I had suspected something was in the works when a couple months before the first episode was released, while I was at my grandpa’s home in the Hamptons, we were invited by Louis CK to see his comedy show. I knew they knew eachother cuz they acted together before, but I found it odd that they were currently in communication, inviting each other to different things. I still didn’t think much of…
Horace and Pete: the birth of comic tragedy
The camera slowly zooms. We set our eyes on a bar: an old school one. A man walks in; rather overweighted and bald. He starts sweeping up the floor. The other door opens. Another man walks in to the frame; this one's rather thin, in fact, very thin. Looks older than the first man. Goes behind the bar and pours 2 cups of coffee. The first man -Horace- joins him. They start drinking their coffee. The thinner man -Pete- says a word and right there, it starts: Horace and Pete. A comic-tragic rebirth of both genres. A complete theatrical- cinematic experience of life and death, tradition and modernism, family and -most importantly-…
100/100
I really can't put to words how this show made me feel. This statement gets thrown around a lot but 'Horace and Pete' is just something in-explainable, the subtle depth of this seemingly linear show is almost in-comprehensible. This is an approach on cinema that I don't think I've ever seen before. Not to say that it was incredibly innovative, it was more like Louis C.K took defining aspects and trademarks from acclaimed directors and pieced them together in such away that it created an aesthetic completely undefinable in my eyes, as if a new, pure form of film-making had just been invented, except I couldn't tell what had actually been changed.
I'm speechless, this has to be one…
Even as an enormous fan of the uniquely dark, awkward style of comic tragedy delivered in "Louie", as well as many other comedic expeditions from Louis C.K., I was still not prepared for the emotional tax that this series entails. While interspersed with extremely dark moments of comical brilliance, "Horace and Pete" reads and flows like a Eugene O'Neill play, layered with tragedy, interpersonal familial tension, and political criticism. To be honest, I did not think that even Louis C.K. retained the ability to develop a story of such tragic weight, stylized in such an oddly theatrical format of acted performance. Each of the ten episodes left me utterly devastated at its conclusion, and made me increasingly more compelled to…
What stuns me most about Horace and Pete is how it employs right-wing rhetoric to mount a left-wing statement on the difficulty of living life in America -- a political conversation in a totally democratic space, Horace and Pete's bar, where something as slight as a reverse shot can have an astounding, even sublime effect on the trajectory of a scene. In the third episode, for example, confined to a static take on an unknown woman's face for the majority of the episode's length, a reverse shot suddenly reveals a dozen implications on the characters and their lives and relationships -- multicam employed as a democratic tool and a humanizing force!
C.K. devotes the series to deconstructing our prejudices, ideologies…
You know- this is a series- so take it off if you are gonna take off other series
Just leave people alone and let them discuss what they want to discuss with their Letterboxd followers.
Look, however you think of TV Shows being reviewed or what not- if you go out of your way to report it- you suck. Just let people talk about what they want and ignore it if you don't like it.
(I'm not saying they should take this off by the way. I'm just saying it's ridiculous that low lives continue to take off stuff that isn't hurting anybody.)