Watch, Watched, Watching: Hindsight in 2020

[Ramsay B.]

Anyone ever watch Burning? I got it when it came out but haven’t pulled the trigger yet.

ETA: Just saw the NFL thread had a similar title. Whoops

[Zorral]

Thank you for starting the new watching thread!

P.S., er -- PBS.  Vienna Blood starts tonight on PBS.  It sounds as though each of the eps is a stand-alone.  It also seems a rather European Alienist (of which a new season is coming sometime this year, IIRC).

https://www.wsj.com/articles/vienna-blood-review-when-opposites-attract-attention-11579211199
~~~~~~~~~~

Avenue 5 debuts tonight on HBO.  The reviews I'd seen have been rather negative, though most of the criticisms seemed to be wanting to sneak into the review soto voce, the NY Times review was rather more detailed, and more boldly, negative.

 

[Nictarion]

Watched Terrence Malik’s Days of Heaven for the first time. Great film. It’s honestly up there with Barry Lyndon as one of the best looking films I’ve ever seen. Just gorgeous. And it has an Ennio Morricone score, which automatically gives it points in my book. 

Also started another re-watch of Six Feet Under. Think this is my 4th or 5th. 

[DireWolfSpirit]

So I've started the 3rd season of The Handmaids Tale.

I really appreciate the way it makes you reflect on so many levels. It's some deepish, darkish corners of dystopian, Orwellian themes going on.

[BigFatCoward]

Its always Sunny dropped on UK Netflix, watched the first 4 episodes.  the quality is massive step up from the last season, but its shit waiting a year at a time for 10 x 22 minute episodes only to watch it in 2-3 days.

[Astromech]

17 hours ago, Zorral said:

Thank you for starting the new watching thread!

P.S., er -- PBS.  Vienna Blood starts tonight on PBS.  It sounds as though each of the eps is a stand-alone.  It also seems a rather European Alienist (of which a new season is coming sometime this year, IIRC).

https://www.wsj.com/articles/vienna-blood-review-when-opposites-attract-attention-11579211199
~~~~~~~~~~

Avenue 5 debuts tonight on HBO.  The reviews I'd seen have been rather negative, though most of the criticisms seemed to be wanting to sneak into the review soto voce, the NY Times review was rather more detailed, and more boldly, negative.

 

Damn, I forgot that  started last night. Oh well, plenty of replays to catch before the next episode.

I watched the Austrian film Sarajevo about the assassination, or rather, investigation of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Interesting.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

Ready or Not was a hell of a lot of fun. I highly recommend it.

Also, that’s the second time I’ve seen that actress and thought she was Margot Robbie’s sister.

[aceluby]

Watched Joker & Pet Semetary over the weekend.  Joker was great, though depressing.  Will probably watch it again in a few months, but it's a hard watch.  Pet Semetary was exactly what I thought it would be.  Wife never read the books or saw the original, so she came in blind and really liked it.

[dbunting]

Crap weather here this weekend so I talked myself into seeing Bad Boys for life. It was actually a pretty fun movie. I had pretty low expectations and they were exceeded, theater was pretty full too.

[Cas Stark]

Watched The Lighthouse which was suitably creepy and beautiful cinematography and also Judy, which while not breaking any new ground on the biopic, was excellent and Zellweger was the perfect actress to play Judy, since her own ticks merged beautifully with those of Garland. 

[Zorral]

Concerning the brief discussion as to why anyone would watch / own dvds these days:

"We Should Have Bought the DVDs"

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/20/opinion/future-dvds-streaming.html

Quote

 

....But I should cancel something. The amount I pay for streaming services is more than a cable package. But I can’t just go back to cable alone, because I wouldn’t have access to certain streaming originals that are basically a form of cultural currency. On top of that, experts predict that the last remaining cable providers will stop offering services within the next five years. I thought I had outsmarted the system, with my measly $7.99 a month. We all thought we outsmarted the system. But that system outsmarted us all in a way that’s irreversible, because we can’t go back to cable — it’s dying, we killed it — and we’re now at the mercy of the streaming services and what they choose to charge us each month.

We never outsmarted the entertainment industry when we opted for Netflix subscriptions over cable. Instead, we gave the industry a way to monetize our love of one or two television shows forever.

The CW Watch was my tipping point, not just because it was the 11th streaming service I subscribed to, but because I had signed up for the sole purpose of rewatching old content. At first, I didn’t even question the fact that I had agreed to pay money each month to view old programs that I could own outright. But I’ve since realized how financially irresponsible it is, and I’ve done the math to prove it: If I subscribe to The CW Watch for a decade, I’ll have spent $1,078 to, more or less, watch three shows I’ve seen before. On the other hand, purchasing the brand-new DVD box sets of these shows would be a grand total of $380.96, which would save me $697.04 over the next 10 years. I should just buy the DVDs and cancel The CW Watch.

 

For me it seems the more streaming extractions there are the fewer shows one wants to bother with, i.e. going very fast back to the days when I never ever watched television of any kind at all -- except to constantly click the remote around and around and around in a hotel room, never ever landing on anything I wanted to watch.

Here, also in the NYT, is someone who thinks he's learned how to beat this neo too much no good system:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/14/smarter-living/manage-streaming-tv-subscriptions-disney-hulu-netflix.html?

 

[briantw]

2 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Ready or Not was a hell of a lot of fun. I highly recommend it.

Also, that’s the second time I’ve seen that actress and thought she was Margot Robbie’s sister.

Really was a fantastic movie.  Laughed more watching it than I have most comedies.

[HexMachina]

9 hours ago, BigFatCoward said:

Its always Sunny dropped on UK Netflix, watched the first 4 episodes.  the quality is massive step up from the last season, but its shit waiting a year at a time for 10 x 22 minute episodes only to watch it in 2-3 days.

Have you started the new season of sex education yet? I’m only two episodes in and i would say its shaping up to be even better than S1

[BigFatCoward]

31 minutes ago, HelenaExMachina said:

Have you started the new season of sex education yet? I’m only two episodes in and i would say its shaping up to be even better than S1

Philly comes first. Always. 

 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

3 hours ago, briantw said:

Really was a fantastic movie.  Laughed more watching it than I have most comedies.

I thought it was a comedy. 

[briantw]

2 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

I thought it was a comedy. 

I mean it's a horror/comedy.  Either way, it was incredibly funny,

[Nictarion]

Thought the first episode of Avenue 5 was decent. Pretty funny premise, and it had a few good laughs. I love that

trying to break a record for largest yoga class caused them to go off course

.

I was hoping for more alumni from Armando Iannucci’s other shows, but unless I missed someone it looks like it’s just Nicola from Thick of It.

[briantw]

Curb premiere was great.  Larry wearing the MAGA hat was great stuff.

Enjoyed Avenue 5 as well.  Good pilot that made me want to keep watching.  Hugh Laurie was as great as expected, and Zach Woods is fantastic as the same character he plays in everything else.  He has one of the best lines in the episode.  I imagine this one will get even better as all the actors settle into their roles and the writers get to know the characters better. 

[Ran]

Some more things watched since my last post:

Hostiles - A revisionist western starring Christian Bale, Rosamund Pike, Wes Studi, and others (including a bit part for Timothée Chalamet). It's pretty enough, it's grim enough, but I thought of it as merely passable. There was potential in the premise, of Bale's racist Indian fighter Army captain, inured to violence and revenge, being forced to escort a dying former enemy chieftain back to his homeland, and Rosemund Pike as a settler's wife who loses her family to a particularly vicious band of Comanche, but it's all rather muddled and drawn out and concludes with a rather false-feeling climactic, tragic end that feels grim for the sake of grimness. The film is no Unforgiven, lets put it that way.

Midnight Run - Never seen this 80s buddy comedy classic starring De Niro and Charles Grodin before, and... I can see why. I checked all the reviews and people loved and continue to love it, but I found it fairly one note, recycling the same gags over and over again. It's nice to see De Niro having fun, to be sure. (Also, it does emphasize to me just how off some of the de-aging in The Irishman was...)

Prisoners - First time seeing this Denis Villeneuve-directed film. The direction was fine but not particularly noteworthy (borne out by the lack of nominations on that score), though the cinematography was excellent (Roger Deakins FTW). A dark story of Hugh Jackman's prepper character taking matters into his own hand when the police can't find his kidnapped daughter and her friend, it throws one or two twists out that went nowhere (there's a thing about a found sock that I can't at all fit into the story other than it being a red herring). Jake Gylenhaal as a troubled police detective trying to solve the case is pretty good, though he adopted a weird blinking tic that felt very "actorish". Paul Dano does Paul Dano. Worth watching, but I suspect you could have trimmed it down in length a bit.

Beirut - A Jon Hamm-led film set mostly in the 1980s, a very good, if old-fashioned, espionage film in which a former State Department negotiator is brought in to negotiate the release of a kidnapped embassy employee he used to know before things went to hell. Hamm's very good in this, playing a role that would have been played by Robert Redford thirty years ago. Looking at commentary on it, apparently the trailer for the film sparked a lot of outrage about its depiction of Lebanon and Arab characters, but the film it self is substantially more nuanced, IMO. Also, funnily enough, another Rosamund Pike performance, now as a CIA agent operating under cover at the embassy who is involved in things. I will say that the final act turns a little bit on this throwaway detail about a superior that doesn't really contribute to the plot, per se, except to provide an excuse to go it alone. Also the very last scene is really super, super 80s film trope inspired.

Atlantics  - Senegalese film directed by French-Senegelase actress-director Mati Diop. It won the Grand Prix at Cannes, and was submitted as Senegal's entry for Best Foreign Language film at the Oscars but was not selected. Many -- maybe most -- of the performers were not actors by trade, but there's an amazing lack of self-consciousness on display on the camera, with some very real performances. It's basically a love story with a supernatural element, set in dusty Dakar with the Atlantic ocean roiling along the shore. Ada, a young woman about to be married in an arranged marriage to the son of a wealthy family, is in love with Souleiman, a construction worker who is unofficial leader of a work crew who are protesting having gone unpaid for four months. Someting happens to him and his friends, Ada is left alone and forced to marry, but... things start happening. It's a beautifully directed film, and quite poetic as it approaches its end.  Also the first time I've seen a film that is primarily in the Wolof, the lingua franca of Senegeal (there's just a bit of French and English as well, and I think some Arabic).

[dbunting]

55 minutes ago, Ran said:

Some more things watched since my last post:

Hostiles - A revisionist western starring Christian Bale, Rosamund Pike, Wes Studi, and others (including a bit part for Timothée Chalamet). It's pretty enough, it's grim enough, but I thought of it as merely passable. There was potential in the premise, of Bale's racist Indian fighter Army captain, inured to violence and revenge, being forced to escort a dying former enemy chieftain back to his homeland, and Rosemund Pike as a settler's wife who loses her family to a particularly vicious band of Comanche, but it's all rather muddled and drawn out and concludes with a rather false-feeling climactic, tragic end that feels grim for the sake of grimness. The film is no Unforgiven, lets put it that way.

 

Hostiles - I think you pretty much plagiarized my review of it, except you used proper wording and phrasing! Beautiful setting, some tense enough parts, strange decision for an ending.

 

I tried the new NBC series, The Bone Collector. Watched Ep 1 and eh, it was passable. Got 10 minutes into Ep 2 and turned it off. The lead actor, something about how he is portraying Lincoln Rhymes just doesn't work for me, I find his speech pattern very distracting and annoying. Now, I have read the book, and several others in the series and have seen the movie so that probably taints me.