Watch, Watched, Watching: Hunting Minds

[Ramsay B.]

I watched Lady Macbeth basically because it stars Florence Pugh, and she delivered in it. I highly recommend for those of us that loved her in Midsommar. The movie itself was solid enough but Pugh definitely carries it.

I also finally saw Three Identical Strangers. What a wild documentary, and ultimately a sad and fucked up one too. 

Spoiler

The ease with how that one former employee of the twin studies was joking about everything he learned and experienced was kind of disturbing. Fucking humans.

 

[Iskaral Pust]

I finished Altered Carbon over the weekend during some flights.  Very good, and definitely worked better for me on screen than as a book.

I tried a couple of episodes of The 100 but did not enjoy it.  Too much of a whiny, emo teenager fantasy.  Perfect for people who loved Hunger Games, Maze Runner, Divergent, etc.

[briantw]

1 hour ago, Triskele said:

Something I find fascinating about Nic Cage is that it's not clear to me whether he's self-aware or not.  

I wish they'd make more movies where he switches faces with other crazy people in Hollywood and has to act like them for an hour and a half.  

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

I'm not going to even bother looking up the technical name because it doesn't deserve it. I watched a number of movies this weekend, but I have to say, the most recent Godzilla movie is absolutely atrocious. 

[dbunting]

13 hours ago, Bittersweet Distractor said:

I’ve not seen the show yet but the instrument you describe is more likely a cello than a violin, used a lot in GoT and very beautiful sounding.

Sounds right, I knew it wasn't a violin, too deep of a sound, but I don't know my string instruments!

[Zorral]

There is nothing equivalent with GOT and Carnival Row.  Not the same sorts of world at all.

What the OP about this is avoiding saying, due to avoiding spoilers, is this:

Spoiler

Incest.

Completed the watch about an hour ago.  Was engaged by this series in a way I haven't been by anything else trying for this audience in a long time.  Makes Mortal Engines looks as silly as it is. Though there's ample silly here too, if one wished to look a little harder.  But at least it avoids the silly of the Castle of the Skeksi in The Dark Crystal -- this silly looking thing in the middle of frackin' nowhere, that doesn't seem to have any support infrastructure such as rivers, sea port, etc.

[dbunting]

4 hours ago, Zorral said:

There is nothing equivalent with GOT and Carnival Row.  Not the same sorts of world at all.

What the OP about this is avoiding saying, due to avoiding spoilers, is this:

  Reveal hidden contents

Incest.

Completed the watch about an hour ago.  Was engaged by this series in a way I haven't been by anything else trying for this audience in a long time.  Makes Mortal Engines looks as silly as it is. Though there's ample silly here too, if one wished to look a little harder.  But at least it avoids the silly of the Castle of the Skeksi in The Dark Crystal -- this silly looking thing in the middle of frackin' nowhere, that doesn't seem to have any support infrastructure such as rivers, sea port, etc.

In your opinion.  

I have seen more than one person make note of several things that are very similar.

[dbunting]

Finished Derry Girls. I liked it but don't love it. Definitely like a lot of the characters. Tough watch for me because I had a hard time understanding some of what was being said. Love the Grandfather and the dad though.

[Jen'ari]

10 hours ago, dbunting said:

Sounds right, I knew it wasn't a violin, too deep of a sound, but I don't know my string instruments!

No worries , it’s a very emotive sounding instrument, I’d love to be able to play it but have put my efforts into guitar and piano for a very long time and don’t think I could face learning a new instrument from scratch at the moment!.

[Isis]

20 hours ago, Iskaral Pust said:

I tried a couple of episodes of The 100 but did not enjoy it.  Too much of a whiny, emo teenager fantasy.  Perfect for people who loved Hunger Games, Maze Runner, Divergent, etc.

Watched about half of the first episode last week and found it difficult to tolerate...

[Derfel Cadarn]

The 100 improves in the 2nd season though backslides in later ones

[Zorral]

Finally finished watching Carnival Row.  Really liked it, and am so glad there will be another season.  But it is heartbreaking to see the round-up by violence of the various creatures and incarcerating all of them inside "the Row," making of the ghetto, now the Warsaw ghetto of WWII.  But was heartened by the elopement of 

Spoiler

Agreus Astrayon and Imogen.  Wonder if they will go to a version of North America?

My first label for the rapist-bedbug-skeksie-in-chief was 'chaos demon."   (I know -- not up there with Boris Johnson's "big girl's blouse" that he hurled at Jeremy Corbyn, alas.)

Interestingly, episodes of the Amazilla Original fantasy-steampunk-Victoriana gothic-horror series, Carnival Row reference the deliberate sowing of chaos via fostering hatred and contempt and fear of 'the others' as the tool for playing power politics. The ultimate villain states, "...in chaos is opportunity."  Not to mention GOT's Littlefinger's bromide that "chaos is a ladder."

Now a paper has been written about this.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/04/opinion/trump-voters-chaos.html?

Quote

 

Last week, at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, the winner of the best paper award in the Political Psychology division was “A ‘Need for Chaos’ and the Sharing of Hostile Political Rumors in Advanced Democracies.”

The paper, which the award panel commended for its “ambitious scope, rigor, and creativity,” is the work of Michael Bang Petersenand Mathias Osmundsen, both political scientists at Aarhus University in Denmark, and Kevin Arceneaux, a political scientist at Temple.

It argues that a segment of the American electorate that was once peripheral is drawn to “chaos incitement” and that this segment has gained decisive influence through the rise of social media....

....The circulation of this type of information (which the authors label “hostile political rumors”) has been “linked to large-scale political outcomes within recent years such as the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”

 

Which is probably why there are ancient dieties that are representations of chaos, such as the Egyptian Set, and more recently the orisha Eleguá - loa Papa Legba.

[Derfel Cadarn]

Made good progress through Battlestar Galactica rewatch, bext episode is Pegasus in season2.

Also watching Peaky Blinders. Good stuff!

[dbunting]

51 minutes ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

Made good progress through Battlestar Galactica rewatch, bext episode is Pegasus in season2.

Also watching Peaky Blinders. Good stuff!

Looking forward to Peaky Blinders new season, wish it was out now, have had a LOT of free time(captive time) on my hands lately, could use another good series to watch.

[Kalbear]

For those of you who are watching or rewatching Fury Road, something I did on my last rewatch that was awesome was track how the action characters go from scene to scene. There's a whole lot going on in the background of shots that sets up action beats 5 or 10 minutes down the road. Example:

Spoiler

The end of the movie with the guy with the baby doll head on the back of his head. He jumps on to the rig, gets a knife thrown at him, falls mostly off, can be seen hanging on underneath in some wide shots, pulls himself up in other shots of other characters, then comes and stabs Furiosa with her own knife. This happens over the course of several minutes.

Steven Soderbergh mentioned how incredible it is that they keep the coherence of the action through all this. Somewhere else I read that they had 300 hours of footage to go through, mostly various different angles of the same scenes, and their choreographer and editor was a nature documentary person who spliced it all together, using visual cues and styles to make sure scenes felt frenetic, coherent and told a story without much dialog. 

[SpaceChampion]

Watching the Dark Crystal series documentary and seeing Ted Biaselli from Netflix talk about it...   The guy reminds of Bash from GLOW.  OMG is Bash in charge of Original Series at Netflix?!

[Iskaral Pust]

I had more flights this week so I tried some new streamable series.  

Carnival Row was really boring.  I dropped it after the pilot. 

The Punisher was not what I expected at all.  I never tried it before because of the Marvel tag, but then I saw mention of it in an article about anti-heroes.  I’ve watched five episodes and I’m enjoying it.  I can definitely see how it created a cult following (including among police apparently) among men who want a hyper-masculine figurehead to push back against the narrative of toxic masculinity.  This character is like Jack Reacher.  But aside from the cultural politics, it’s reasonably good TV so far and I need something to watch during flights. 

 

[Astromech]

On 9/3/2019 at 11:34 PM, Triskele said:

I finished Dark Crystal on Netflix and thought it was great overall with the Skeksis being the best part.  Some amazing voice acting bringing them to life from Simon Pegg, Mark Hamil, Jason Isaacs, Benedict Wong, and Awkwafina.  I believe that Keegan Michael Key played one of them too but couldn't place that as easily.  

ETA:  This documentary that comes after it is pretty great too.  Interesting that Henson apparently thought the Gelfling puppets didn't work so well in the first film.  

I've seen a few reviews saying that they still don't because the puppets can't emote enough.  I see that a little bit in a few moments but think they largely work well.

Finished this series earlier today. I enjoyed it. Not as good as the film, but still an enjoyable series. Would like to see another season or two advancing the storyline, but the ended worked fine for a limited series. The Skeksis were a bit too comical for my taste, but Chamberlain was still creepy as hell. Wouldn't mind seeing a Mindhunter/Dark Crystal crossover with Ford and Tench interviewing  Chamberlain.

[Martell Spy]

About to watch The Spy on Netflix. It looks fantastic.

Just finished Snowfall season 3. Another great season.

Also finishing up season 9 of the Walking Dead. Pretty good season, but I'm no longer paying to stream it, so I had to wait for Netflix to drop it.

Saw a large chunk of IT chapter 2, but I had to take care of something and did not see the last hour. My impression is it's fairly decent, but not as good as chapter 1 was. It's too long and some of that stuff could have used cutting.

[red snow]

Enjoying mindhunter a lot after finally getting around to it.

Finished killing eve season 2. Not as good as season 1 but the performances keep it going. It's becoming more like a UK version of Hannibal with jokes instead of arty weirdness.