Watch, Watched, Watching: Hindsight in 2020

[HexMachina]

14 hours ago, BigFatCoward said:

The acting was great. Adam is particularly fantastic. And every time Eric smiles the world seems a little bit better. 

I love how everything spins around Otis, who is by far the least interesting character (basically regular teenage problems). 

That being said, I can't face much more Ross/Rachel will they/wont they between him and Maeve. 

Ncuti Gatwa (Eric) is a godamn delight. As is Amy Lou (er...Aimee on the show too, ha!)

Pretty sure the fans are more interested in Maeve and Otis as a couple than any of the cast or writers are.

[RedEyedGhost]

I watched seasons 1 and 2 of Sex Education over the past week and a half.  Really enjoyed it.  I do think I prefer season 1, though.  Aimee's storyline was definitely the best of season 2, but Eric's and Jackson's were quality as well.  Like BFC said, Otis is by far the least interesting character.  Liked the stuff with Maeve and the Quiz Heads, hated the stuff with her mom.

After that I watched the new Dracula on Netflix.  That was completely different than I expected, and I loved it.  Claes Bang did an amazing job, and just oozed charisma.  Dolly Wells was wonderful also.

[Inkdaub]

I watched Polar last night.  Every scene with Mikkelsen in it is good just because...Mikkelsen is in it.  Even a ridiculous scene is made better by his presence.  Hudgens did a pretty good job, too.  Otherwise I'm not sure what to think.  I find myself trying to think of reasons to like it.  The movie is pretty absurd, though.  I even like to think I can see what they were going for...but they missed for the most part. 

There is one sequence that I thought was really great...

Spoiler

...where Mads and Hudgens awkwardly talk for the first time telling each other 'it's funny we're neighbors'.

 

[red snow]

I really enjoyed Ford vs Ferrari. Had a very classic feel to it with strong performances all around and a story you could easily get behind. It's also nice for miles to get some more exposure because while i was aware of who shelby was i didn't know much about him. Seems shitty how history/the sport treat him so it's good for his involvement to get a highlight in this film. I was also releived to hear he was accept into drivers hall of fame.

[HexMachina]

16 hours ago, RedEyedGhost said:

I watched seasons 1 and 2 of Sex Education over the past week and a half.  Really enjoyed it.  I do think I prefer season 1, though.  Aimee's storyline was definitely the best of season 2, but Eric's and Jackson's were quality as well.  Like BFC said, Otis is by far the least interesting character.  Liked the stuff with Maeve and the Quiz Heads, hated the stuff with her mom.

After that I watched the new Dracula on Netflix.  That was completely different than I expected, and I loved it.  Claes Bang did an amazing job, and just oozed charisma.  Dolly Wells was wonderful also.

Agree on SE and episodes one and two of Dracula. Episode 3 was pretty awful imo though. The ‘twist’ could have worked but i felt it was poorly executed.

Dolly Wells was a highlight of the show though, both in terms of character and acting

[BigFatCoward]

This Country S3 starts 17th feb on bbc3. If you haven't seen it get involved. It's the funniest programme on TV. 

[john]

On 2/8/2020 at 12:08 AM, Martini Sigil said:

On the third episode of Locke & Key, the casting is terrific... all three kids are perfect, and about as close to the books as is reasonable to expect... really this show was only going to be as good as the kid who  plays Bode... and the kid is imminently likable.... the Tom Savini bit is wonderful....lol... I'll revisit in 7 episodes... 

I’m liking it. It’s close to the books in plot but not really in tone. They’ve made it more a standard Netflix show, more high school drama with fantasy elements. The horror is pretty tame, a la Sabrina. The acting is good though, yeah, especially the Bode kid.

[Zorral]

I watched the first ep each of Lock & Key and Ragnorok.  It was nearly impossible to tell them apart!  Particularly the first scene in which the single mom is driving her kids through a snowy landscape, moving them back to a house that belongs to the family, which involves a new school in the middle of a school year, while the kids are also in the middle of finishing high school, or the Norwegian equivalent.

The real difference is that Ragnorok is more outward looking into the world's great environmental crises, thanks to the rich and powerful, and the protagonist's family is not even well off, much less rich, while the quite wealthy Lock & Key family is going ever more subjectively interior.

Ragnorok is a lot more fun.  I may continue with that. Plus I'm curious to see if I enjoy  Ragnorock's mom's character in other episodes as much as I did in the first one. As for even another episode of  Lock & Key? highly unlikely!

[SpaceChampion]

Not sure what other thread to put this in but here is Adam Sandler's hilarious NSFW speech at the Independent Spirit Awards.

 

[williamjm]

I watched last year's Hellboy remake on Netflix. Guillermo Del Toro and Ron Perlman had seemed like the perfect director/actor combination for the franchise so I was sceptical about a Hellboy film without either of them involved being as good as the previous two films, but that's still no excuse for this film being quite as terrible as it is. To be fair, if someone other than Ron Perlman had to play Hellboy I thought David Harbour didn't do a bad job in the role, but that's about the only thing that seems to work in the film. The plot is incoherent, the action scenes are tedious and most of the actors seem bored by the whole thing (particularly Ian McShane who seems to be doing an impression of his John Wick role). The film's idea of bringing something new to the franchise seems to be to add lots of gore and swearing, but it's no Deadpool.

[AncalagonTheBlack]

Finished Netflix’s Locke & Key . What a bland and very average show. I have not read the comics, so can't say how the show compares.

[Heartofice]

1 hour ago, williamjm said:

I watched last year's Hellboy remake on Netflix. Guillermo Del Toro and Ron Perlman had seemed like the perfect director/actor combination for the franchise so I was sceptical about a Hellboy film without either of them involved being as good as the previous two films, but that's still no excuse for this film being quite as terrible as it is. To be fair, if someone other than Ron Perlman had to play Hellboy I thought David Harbour didn't do a bad job in the role, but that's about the only thing that seems to work in the film. The plot is incoherent, the action scenes are tedious and most of the actors seem bored by the whole thing (particularly Ian McShane who seems to be doing an impression of his John Wick role). The film's idea of bringing something new to the franchise seems to be to add lots of gore and swearing, but it's no Deadpool.

I couldn’t get through more than an hour of it. It’s like they decided all the charm and interesting design of the original movies was unnecessary and just went with something a lot more basic and uninspiring because they couldn’t be arsed.

It really hit me when you see similar scenes they remade, like Hellboys origin. McShane is also a seriously lazy actor and has been phoning it in for pretty much a decade.

[williamjm]

4 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

I couldn’t get through more than an hour of it. It’s like they decided all the charm and interesting design of the original movies was unnecessary and just went with something a lot more basic and uninspiring because they couldn’t be arsed.

You didn't miss anything by quitting early, I think the film might actually have gotten worse as it neared the finale. I agree that where the original Hellboy films felt like a labour of love for Del Toro, this felt very perfunctory.

6 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

It really hit me when you see similar scenes they remade, like Hellboys origin.

I think one of the many mistakes may have been to have some flashback scenes that were so similar to the original film but not as good. Even weirder was Damio's flashback where he basically seemed to be recounting the plot of Predator.

[Teng Ai Hui]

15 hours ago, john said:

I’m liking it. It’s close to the books in plot but not really in tone. They’ve made it more a standard Netflix show, more high school drama with fantasy elements. The horror is pretty tame, a la Sabrina. The acting is good though, yeah, especially the Bode kid.

I'm halfway through Locke & Key and enjoying it so far.  I'm planning to read some of the books after I'm done with the tv series.  How many volumes of the book are covered by season one of the tv series?

[DireWolfSpirit]

Thought an Oscars thread would be up, but I'm leaving this here because anything Janelle Monae (Harriet) is in I'm "Watch, watched, and watching".

Here she is on the red carpet looking fabulous, ignore the asshat next to her.

 

[Mark Antony]

Guess I’m watching parasite asap

[Ran]

1917 - Posted about it in the thread for the film, but will just say that I think Parasite is somewhat overpraised (especially in comparison to 2018's Shoplifters, which hits a number of similar notes without becoming twee or absurd) and this was my pick for best film and best director. I'd even have put Marriage Story over Parasite in best picture. I'm more okay with Bong Joon Ho taking director, all considered, because it's a very well-directed film, very precise and Hitchcockian almost. Anyways, 1917 is a triumph of directon, production design and coordination, and especially cinematography (so hat's off to Roger Deakins).

Good Time - Watched this after having seen Uncut Gems. The Safdie Brothers are some cynical, dark-souled guys, but their films have a propulsion to them (or maybe a compulsion is more right) that pulls you along as the camera roves watching the lead character (this time by a very good Robert Pattinson) screw up over and over again. I don't know their previous films, but if their next film plays along a similar line to this, people will start to wonder if they really have nothing more to say. 

The End of Evangelion - The attempt to "fix" the controversial ending of the Neon Genesis Evangelion series with more of a budget, and more maturity (including a rather out-of-left-field sexual scene at the very start that's entirely true to the character of Shinji Ikari, but shocked me after the less graphic, more playful sexuality of the cartoon). I was pleasantly surprised that if anything the directors still leaned into the philosophical aspects, and in particular their metatextual commentary which featured live action footage inserted of audiences sitting in a cinema, and then the cinema theatre empty. I gather that this was still held to be controversial, as some read it as a kind of "fuck off" to people who couldn't handle the original ending, and that's fine by me. It was certainly very cinematic.

Mandy - Wow. Hyperstylized indeed. If that talked-about Elric series gets out of development hell, they should talk to Panos Cosmatos about it. The way he brings a 70s, sword-and-sorcery aesthetic to the lighting and production design. Very Richard Corben/Boris Vallejo/Julie Bell (the latter of whom provided artwork used in this film). It's a crazy, crazy horror film, featuring the full Nic Cage experience combined with a creepy, hippy cult leader played by Linus Roach and a bizzare array of demonic bikers that feel like they came out of a Hellraiser cosplay convention. It definitely moves to the beat of its own drummer.  I was trying to find an image to share from the final scene, and so will first link to Professor Walter Metz's http://waltermetz.com/mandy-2018/ (note: NSFW, some screencaps feature nudity) and then point to this image of the last shot from said essay. (His commentary about the end is off, though -- he didn't recognize Nic Cage's Galactus reference as not being a planet at all...)

[Heartofice]

Luckily enough I watched Parasite yesterday! Good timing.

Overall I think it's a very good movie, very enjoyable... does it deserve Best Picture... not for me. 

On the plus side I think it looks fabulous, I think the pacing is great and I always felt engaged by it. The way everything was constructed, both visually and plot wise was incredibly well done. I really liked a lot of the performances, especially both mum and dads. I came away thinking about the topic and I think it has some reasonably interesting things to say about wealth and class.

But on the other side, something didn't quite click for me. I think a bit of it is the tone of the movie. The world in Parasite exists as a sort of heightened comic reality in a lot of ways (reminded me of Oldboy), and a lot of the performances and humour are rather broad. I think because of this, I didn't really connect with any of the characters. They were closer to caricatures than real people and because of that something didn't quite hit me in the way I think the movie wanted it to. 
Then maybe the humour just doesn't translate as well? I dunno, I felt sometimes there were moments where jokes were being told and things people were saying were meant to be funny, but the fact I was reading subtitles meant it went over my head a bit. Blasphemy I know, but I do think it can be hard to really watch foreign comedy and appreciate it in the same way. I might be wrong, but i did feel I was missing something. 

I get the feeling the movie is being over praised, it didn't bowl me over, but that's not to say that I didn't greatly enjoy it.

[Raja]

Big fan of Parasite getting love at the Oscars

[dbunting]

Started watching S1 of Sex education last night, only two episodes in and it seems pretty good.

Watched Birds of Prey this weekend. I had talked myself out of going but then talked myself into some popcorn and went anyway. The popcorn was good, the movie was eh? The movie has a strange pacing to it, which I assume is to make it feel like you are a part of Harley, kind of all over the place. The main villain sucked. One thing I noticed after a while was every song in the movie was sang by a female, enjoyed some Barracuda! 

There was one sequence that was the silliest but at the same time the most enjoyable?

Spoiler

Harley goes to police station to get the kid and somehow lays waste to the entire police force with a tear gas type launcher that she has to reload slowly after each shot. How the hell did no one shoot her while she was reloading! But, I have to say I did really like the scene due to the silly colors and streamers used as weapons.