Also in true detective, Rusts diploma-in-the-humanities grade existential waffling pissed me off.
I feel since they only had 2 main characters they tried to cover as many bases with each character as they could.
Rust is a great and very capable detective, a thoughtful intellectual and also it seems some kind of emo teenager who writes poetry.

I got that vibe too, but I kind of liked it. I don't watch a ton of TV but I haven't seen a cop show with a character like that before: really, it's just beer philosophy and not much more, and as a diploma-in-the-humanities person myself, I can relate. I wish they'd stuck with exploring his synesthesia a bit more. Not because I can directly relate to it, but because I thought that was where the show was going, sort of like an Upstream Color vibe. But then it turned into little more than a really good detective show.

Season 2.. I don't know. Collin Farrell's great in a lot of things and Vince Vaughn has had some great things too. Farrell seemed to shed his rom-com identity pretty quickly whereas Vaughn seems stuck in it, and S2's seemingly getting a lot of flak just because of the casting choices. I guess I'm getting off-topic now, but I'm still excited, and if it sucks, well, it's only 7 episodes.

Vince Vaughn in ugly and hasn't been in a single thing that was any good, fuck that guy. Colin Farrell has been in one or two PASSABLE movies but remains an extremely annoying person to watch. Fuck them both.

Beer philosophy still puts it above every Linklater film I've seen combined (although I haven't seen anything since Waking Life, because after sitting through that - for an honors level film seminar, no less - I decided I wasn't going to subject myself to any more of his 9th grade ~~dEEp~~ThouGHts~~. I mean, shit, even that second Matrix movie had more nuance than Waking Life.

Point being, you could do worse than beer philosophy and a lot of people do, most of them probably the sort of people who don't recognize how important the humanities are.

Why you got to leave me in such suspense? When will your parentheses close!?!?

I've said it before, but I really liked the Newton Boys and School of Rock.. Linklater's kind of like Rodriguez: Rodriguez makes violent-as-fuck movies for his grindhouse audience and then kids movies for (and starring) his kids, and other kids. Linklater makes tolerable mainstream A-B movies, and the "intellectual" movies for his "intellectual" audience, which are about as uncomfortable to sit through as sitting on your copy of Goodman's Growing Up Absurd shoved in your back pocket the whole time. Oh wait! That was totally in Slacker!

That being said, you might want to give Scanner Darkly a try (re: torrent it.) I didn't love it, but after a series of less-than-stellar Dick adaptations it did a good job of capturing the atmosphere, if nothing else, and the acting was good. Now we're way off topic, but Woody Harrelson was in Scanner Darkly and True Detective, so maybe it's going full-circle. Oh yeah. And fuck Glenn Beck. :)

@Zircon
I loved Waking life. But I appreciated it for its very vivid visual effects and the general weird dreamy tone of it.
I didnt feel that any of the musings presented in the dialogue were meant to be in any way taken seriously or even paid much attention to.

They still accuse liberals and academics of trying to re-define the language, don't they? Or have even the Republicans figured out that everyone laughs at them and says "Freedom Fries" and "Homicide Bombers" whenever they try?

Liberals and academics DO try to redefine the language, though. That's a hobby that transcends idealogy.