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Watch, Watched, Watching: The Workprint Prototype Version


RedEyedGhost

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Old thread.

I watched Sing Street the other day, that was extremely enjoyable and I would like to watch it again already.  Their videos were great.  The day before I watched Miles Ahead, it wasn't bad, but I don't have any desire to watch it again any time soon (if ever).

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11 hours ago, Astromech said:

I watched the film Dope the other night. 3 high school kids in Inglewood, CA who love 90s hip hop culture get caught up in drugs. It was entertaining. Having been a teen in the 90s, I loved all of the cultural references.

That was a really fun movie.  Loved the girl on the bad high :lol: 

 

1 hour ago, House Cambodia said:

I'm just finishing up 2011's Camelot

I enjoy seeing Eva Green get naked too.  Outside of that reason, I don't understand why anybody would watch that terrible show. 

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1 hour ago, RedEyedGhost said:

Old thread.

I watched Sing Street the other day, that was extremely enjoyable and I would like to watch it again already.  Their videos were great.  The day before I watched Miles Ahead, it wasn't bad, but I don't have any desire to watch it again any time soon (if ever).

Sing Street was absolutely brilliant. It is my favorite movie this year. I hope it gets some musical love from the Oscars this year. I love John Carney movies, and this just might be his best yet,

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Man, Sing Street won't come out here for months probably :( I want to see it now.

5 hours ago, RedEyedGhost said:

I enjoy seeing Eva Green get naked too.  Outside of that reason, I don't understand why anybody would watch that terrible show. 

A dare gone wrong? Or perhaps someone with a fetish for really bad portrayals of King Arthur. That twilight bum they dragged up from the deep to play him in this version is easily the worst King Arthur portrayal I have ever seen. If someone made a list with the biggest miscasting in history, he should have a really prominent slot on that.

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12 hours ago, RedEyedGhost said:

I enjoy seeing Eva Green get naked too.  Outside of that reason, I don't understand why anybody would watch that terrible show. 

You can see her naked in just about everything these days, so no reason to watch something terrible just for that.

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7 hours ago, Veltigar said:

Man, Sing Street won't come out here for months probably :( I want to see it now.

 

I wouldn't worry about the wait if I were you. I absolutely adored this movie, which means that you are going to hate it anyway.

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5 minutes ago, Howdyphillip said:

I wouldn't worry about the wait if I were you. I absolutely adored this movie, which means that you are going to hate it anyway.

I love all of Carney's previous films Howdy :P You shouldn't overgeneralise :P 

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Damn season three of Banshee has been fucking wild.  The episode where they're locked down in the police station was one of the better episodes of television I've ever seen.  The heist one was really great too.  

One episode to go before season four.

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Really do need to finish out Banshee Season 4 but it's not out on Prime yet..

Finishing up The Last Kingdom which has been a pleasant surprise. I also discovered that Rectify is on Netflix so I'll be able to watch S2 next. I daresay Netflix almost has too many shows that I want to watch. Marco Polo, Cartel Land, Beasts of No Nation, Peaky Blinders, Nightcrawler, Silver Linings Playbook, The Big Short, Dope, Narcos, House of Cards, many of the other Netflix originals.. it's just too much.

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22 hours ago, Veltigar said:

Man, Sing Street won't come out here for months probably :( I want to see it now.

A dare gone wrong? Or perhaps someone with a fetish for really bad portrayals of King Arthur. That twilight bum they dragged up from the deep to play him in this version is easily the worst King Arthur portrayal I have ever seen. If someone made a list with the biggest miscasting in history, he should have a really prominent slot on that.

Heh, in order to cleanse myself, I rounded it off by rewatching the ultimate word in Arthuria, 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail'. Oh yes!

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I went to see the new Jason Bourne film today. I really like the original trilogy of films, I think this film stuck fairly closely to the Supremacy/Ultimatum formula (including Paul Greengrass' fondness for shakycam, which I've always had mixed feeling about) without necessarily bringing much new but I thought it was still an entertaining film. At times I did wonder if the CIA are ever going to learn their lesson after five films but Tommy Lee Jones's character is the latest to make the same sort of mistakes they always do. I did like Alicia Vikander's character who managed to be a bit more enigmatic than the others in the film.

I do feel that maybe the CIA might do better at keeping their secrets if they didn't have a folder called "Black Operations" on their server for hackers to find.

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I finally decided to give the extended version of Kingdom of Heaven a try. I had heard a lot of praise for it over the years, so I was curious to see if it was as good as advertised. Especially since I already enjoyed the theatrical cut, which has gotten way to much hate over the years. I think it's easily Ridley Scott's best work since Gladiator (sorry to all you Exodus and American Gangster fans). Thus, I bought the blu-ray and settled in for a nice long evening of film (the director's cut is an assnumbingly long 190 minutes in total).

I have to say I was really disappointed. In no shape or form is this better than the theatrical cut. All the extra material either removes somes of the ambiguities that made the theatrical cut all the better (e.g. the exact nature of Godfrey's relation to Balian's mother), adds things that are completely worthless (e.g. The whole son plot or the priests beef with Balian or who he designates as the heir to Ibelin) or it overclarifies things we could have easily inferred from what  the shorter theatrical cut gave us (e.g. that the master-gravedigger knew who the queen was when she dressed his wounds). And it does all of these stupid things at the cost of the theatrical cut's easy-going flow, which was one of the best things about it really. The theatrical cut is very well paced, which is essential to our ability to ignore a lot of the stupid stuff in the screenplay.

It certainly didn't help that every other added scene was slowed down. Like Balian had taken some downers and was really slow to react to his surroundings. Orlando Bloom isn't exactly leading man material, he's pretty atrocious as an actor and this director's cut, just gives him more rope to hang himself on. He was a lot more sufferable in the theatrical cut. I also feel like a lot of the other cool characters were diminished by this version. Kingdom of Heaven's portrayal of Saladin was always my favourite part of the film. I know Scott made him a lot more enlightened and peace loving than he actually was, but the hagiographic take on him that Scott offers in the theatrical cut is so damn good and also so damn balsy given the post 9/11 world it was shot in. The extra scenes with him in deflated that larger than life portrayal. A problem that became worse because we had to wait a lot longer to get to his scenes, since there was all that useless Sybilla and Guy de Lusignan crap in between.

While the director's cut had all these added problems, it didn't really fix any of the myriad issues this film had before. There is still the troubling white saviour strand in the story. The finest example of which can be seen in his visit to Ibelin, where he - a former inhabitant of lush, verdant and fecund France - miraculously finds the way to turn his arid lands into a veritable garden of Eden. All it needed was water all along and none of the pesky darkies, who had probably been living on that domain for the last couple of centuries, thought of that before he arrived. How great to have a white man on the premisse! In fact the director's cut makes it even worse, because almost immediately after the water is discovered we get this ridiculous time lapse that shows how his piece of desert transforms into a nice lush piece of real estate in like three days?

We still get hardly any extra scenes between Bloom and Neeson, which would have explained his transformation from humble blacksmith into superknight. For that matter, we still don't get a good explanation for his martial prowess. The director's cut might have a throwaway line in it in which he says that he's seen combat before, but that makes it all the more ridiculous that he doesn't know the advantages of a high guard. 

Another thing that feels fake to me is the dedication of Balian's men to him. We never get to see an eplanation that makes any sense. One minute he arrives, they accept him as Godfrey's son, he does his white saviour water mage schtick and boom, they are ready to ride into the jaws of certain death for him outside of Kerak? Did they all want to die? Because there a lot easier ways to take your own life. If they really needed to pad this film out, they should have used those 40 extra minutes to solve those problems. Likewise, Reynald de Chattilon (who's moustache twirling menace is a lot more powerful in the theatrical cut I might add) warns Guy that Balian is loved, but why? We never see him interact with anyone outside of Sybila and Tyberias. He pulled one impressive feet at Kerak, but we don't get to see how that influences the people in Jeruzalem. And now all of a sudden he's so loved that he's a threat? Pretty weak imo. 

It's a shame really, that this movie is the way it is. The crusades are such an interesting time period, they deserve a better depiction on the silver silver. Still, both the theatrical cut and the director's cut do a couple of things right. One thing I always admired about both is the fact that going on the crusade isn't really framed in religious terms all that often. It's more hyped as going to the land of opportunity, a place where great riches can be made, which is a lot more accurate than the usual 'ERMAHGJERD Dieu le veut' stuff we are usually served up. The portrayal of Christians as the biggest zealots (true in that time period), the openness and splendour of Islam and the tensions between the recently arrived Christians and the descendants of the very first crusaders is also a thing they both depict rather nicely. 

14 hours ago, House Cambodia said:

Heh, in order to cleanse myself, I rounded it off by rewatching the ultimate word in Arthuria, 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail'. Oh yes!

All is right again :) Ego te absolvo ;) 

 

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I like to watch No Commentary/No Death playthroughs of old games on Youtube, and I watched one for a game that was the absolute bane of my childhood video game playing experience back in the early 1990s: Virtual Bart. Holy shit, was that game way harder than I even realized back then - neither me nor my brother and friends stood a chance of beating it as kids. Entertaining to watch, though, and it brought back old memories. 

Back in TV Land, I (of course) watched all the way through Bojack Horseman Season 3, and I've been watching a ton of Simpsons episodes now that all of them are available on demand either online or On Demand through my cable provider. I think it has changed my evaluation of the series' supposed decline in quality. Season 15 is kind of a turd, but Seasons 17-20 are fantastic. 

Film-wise, I watched the Ghostbusters movie in theater, then went home and watched the old film on demand. I . . .think I enjoyed the new film more, but that's because Venkman's pick-up-artist schtick is cringe-worthy. Everything else was good in both films, including the humor (the old Ghostbusters was structurally a better film, though, in terms of plot and set-up). 

6 hours ago, williamjm said:

I do feel that maybe the CIA might do better at keeping their secrets if they didn't have a folder called "Black Operations" on their server for hackers to find.

Heh. I've heard that some of the really classified stuff is stored on really old computers with old operating systems, because they've worked out all the bugs and made them reliable. 

I enjoyed the film, too, although I think they put too much complication into the plot. 

Spoiler

They should have just kept it as 

1. Nicky Parsons gets in trouble from her hacking, goes to Bourne for help

2. Bourne tries to save her from the CIA, but she dies

3. Bourne goes on a rampage/discovery, chasing after the folks who killed her to expose the new CIA operation

4. Bourne kills Tommy Lee Jones (or he gets killed by Vikander's character), cue exposure of the new program, cue ambiguous ending, the end. 

The whole thing with Deep Mind and the "second hit" on the tech mogul felt like unnecessary complication. These movies exist so we can get the visceral pleasure of seeing Jason Bourne outsmart a room full of morally questionable CIA folks, so over-complicating that just detracts from it. 

 

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20 hours ago, Veltigar said:

Especially since I already enjoyed the theatrical cut, which has gotten way to much hate over the years. I think it's easily Ridley Scott's best work since Gladiator (sorry to all you Exodus and American Gangster fans).

I think I'd probably say The Martian was his best post-Gladiator work.

Heh. I've heard that some of the really classified stuff is stored on really old computers with old operating systems, because they've worked out all the bugs and made them reliable.

I remember hearing once that the FSB had returned to using typewriters to write some reports, which is one way to avoid hackers.

I enjoyed the film, too, although I think they put too much complication into the plot. 

I can see why they wanted to make it a bit more topical and have the plot being inspired by Assange/Snowden/Facebook, but they did seem a bit half-hearted about the attempts to make the plot more complex, they spent a lot of time on it but it never really felt like the main focus of the film.

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Finished season 4 of The Wire and while it wasn't quite as magnificent as I hoped it was still really, really, really good. The 'main character' has maybe half an episode's worth of screentime, and the titular wire tap is pretty much non-existent, but it doesn't matter one bit, because the kids who carried the story did so terrifically. The school plotline might be my favorite of The Wire yet. The politics were really well done, and the acting was as stellar as always.
There was a stretch of episodes in the middle where the plot hardly seemed to advance though, and the finale left me a bit underwhelmed, but I really don't know why because on page it's a very good ending. Maybe all the rave reviews for this season had built up my expectations too much.

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I finished The Heavy Water War (Kampen om tungtvannet) about the WWII raid on the Norsk Hydro heavy water plant in Telemark, Norway. It focused mostly on Leif Tronstad and Werner Heisenberg. Very good miniseries.

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8 hours ago, First of My Name said:

Finished season 4 of The Wire and while it wasn't quite as magnificent as I hoped it was still really, really, really good.

I liked it, but I always preferred Season 3 to it. Maybe because I like high drama a lot - my favorite scene in the series is still this

 

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