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Watch, Watched, Watching: What Old Is New When There Is No New


Zorral

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Started re-watching The Wire recently and the scene where McNulty crashes his car, gets out, tries to figure out what went wrong, then takes the turn again and crashes the car even worse is one of my favorite scenes in television history.  :lol:

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Finished I, Claudius. Had not expected Patrick Stewart (with full shock of hair), John Rhys-Davies and Bernard Hill to turn up as Roman Soldiers. There are so many familiar traits on display - it was like watching ASoIaF without the dragons. John Hurt's Caligula, a depraved Peter Pan gone mad, was disturbing. He had some great exchanges with Claudius. But Livia had the best lines - in admonishing the gladiators; "these games have been degraded by professional tricks to stay alive, I won't have it!"
 
Been keeping up with Snowpiercer, but mainly to find out more specifications on the Snowpiercer and its 1001 cars. Every car seems to be a TARDIS.

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On 7/3/2020 at 8:51 PM, Zorral said:

You are taking these risks of c-19 infection to -- watch this?  Which you even say wasn't good? Color me authentically baffled.

The answer I should give:

[Read this in Growly voice] Vin Diesel is family and family goes above everything!!!

The answer I shall give:

You got to take the local context into account. Unlike certain other countries our R0 has been below 1 for weeks now. Things are opening up and sitting in a room meant for 200 people with exactly 8 people spread over the entire hall seems safe enough to me.

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2 hours ago, Veltigar said:

The answer I should give:

[Read this in Growly voice] Vin Diesel is family and family goes above everything!!!

The answer I shall give:

You got to take the local context into account. Unlike certain other countries our R0 has been below 1 for weeks now. Things are opening up and sitting in a room meant for 200 people with exactly 8 people spread over the entire hall seems safe enough to me.

Ah.  I thought you were in England, which is very different.

 

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Saw Bridge of Spies.

It's just about okay - Mark Rylance is the highlight. Everything else is average and what could have been a very good movie is instead a mediocre one.

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12 minutes ago, Raja said:

Saw Bridge of Spies.

It's just about okay - Mark Rylance is the highlight. Everything else is average and what could have been a very good movie is instead a mediocre one.


I need to see this just because I work near there, but everything I've heard and seen about it suggests this is not one of Spielberg's more inspired efforts.

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13 minutes ago, Raja said:

Saw Bridge of Spies.

It's just about okay - Mark Rylance is the highlight. Everything else is average and what could have been a very good movie is instead a mediocre one.

Agree.  Totally generic 'good' movie in the most mediocre way possible.  Nothing is bad but the good is so bland and by the numbers.

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The Frankie Drake Mysteries (2017) season 1, CBC, streaming on amazon prime.

The Frankie Drake Mysteries is  brought to us by the Murdoch Mysteries team (2008 -2020, 14 seasons so far). At this point anyway, FD is a more light-hearted crime series. It too has a dependable ensemble cast, is set in Toronto. Like MM Frankie Drake frequently features a rotating appearance of real world figures. The first and third eps included Ernest Hemingway as an  intermittent character, Mack Sennett in the 5th, Al Capone in the 7th (I'm up to the 8th ep tonight). However, while MM is fin de siecle, Frankie Drake's time is the Jazz Age.

Happily, unlike Murdoch's Toronto, Jazz Age Toronto brings us lots of good music, which is remarkably well done, meaning how seldom long-running situational television does music well. Unlike Murdoch too, there are many characters of color, including Frankie’s partner in the detective agency, Trudy, who sings wonderfully and has extraordinarily beautiful, huge eyes and a wonderful family with two of the most charming young brothers ever. Frankie’s  intermittent black boxer  boyfriend seems to be a model of some sort for one of historical Hemingway’s boxing stories. Series has been renewed for a 4th season so somebody is watching it.

The mise en scene and the costumes are very high quality. Especially the clothes.  The designers put a lot of art and thought into the costuming.  Classic 20’s fashion, but with their own interpretation of it, which is always a joy to the eyes. The earrings, o their earrings!  They are to die for!

As with MM, I wasn't thrilled by the first episode, but like MM, Frankie Drake quickly charmed me, and charms me ever more in each subsequent episode.  In the case of Frankie Drake what initially captured my attention was that the prejudice and racial conditions (and those of women!) of 1920's North American were not ignored, yet the writers and actors hit the issue with the ensemble characters perfectly in a tone that matches the tone of the show – to my ears anyway, others may have other opinions. The show does not make light of racial prejudice, or how it affects the characters, this is not a 'color-blind' racially blind show -- but racism isn't the point of the characters.  The point of the characters is always entirely who they are, from backstory with family, friends, lost husbands, and most of all, the work they love and want to do.

The show's reshuffled all the characters, locations and other elements that made Murdoch so popular, with the real difference coming out of seeing the stories primarily from the perspectives of the Toronto Outsiders, whether of color, entertainers, non-traditional aspirational women, as well as those, who because of WWI, have lost their fathers and husbands (Canada sent a whole lot of men to the European slaughter). This reveals the Toronto to which all sorts of minorities beyond the Irish, etc., have always come. 

By and large it is women who are centered in each episode. The show is unabashedly feminist, though not preachy about it.. Not only are there white Frankie and black Trudy as the leads, but other African American women and Asian women are strongly featured. Plus women of size – as with character regular, Flo, who is the agency's insider in the morgue. Trudy is no ‘side kick’.  She gets featured at least as much as Frankie. Thus the title is rather unfortunate.  

I’m liking the series a lot.  I wish seasons 2, 3 and 4 were available.
 

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18 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

Agree.  Totally generic 'good' movie in the most mediocre way possible.  Nothing is bad but the good is so bland and by the numbers.

Yea totally agree with this. Worth seeing because it's good but not much more than that.

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Watched Dark S3 over the weekend. There were parts which felt overtly repetitiuous to the point of thinking, 'hopefully they are going to fix this in the conclusion?', which I think they did, mostly. (I can read the thread now that I've finished anyway.) But overall it was very satisfying and I think I will watch the whole thing again at some point.

Just in time for my birthday weekend: Hamilton. It took a while for me to get my head round the difference in perception from seeing it in a theatre. The first time I went I was in the second row but way over to the LHS of the stage; the second time I was dead centre front row of the dress circle. Seeing the actor's faces so close up is kind of a weird feeling when you're watching a play! Great to see it again though and I am sure I will do a few rewatches.

New season of Deadwind and the protagonist is STILL going off alone to investigate dangerous situations. I just find this quite unrealistic where 'maverick' cops/investigators* keep doing things that obviously go against protocol and then fuck all happens to them in the way repercussions so they just keep doing it season after season. I know it's fiction but it's a procedural drama. This isn't something that an employee would be allowed to continue doing over and over. Also, it's lazy writing - things can and do still go wrong when multiple people are investigating dangerous situations.

 

*this was why I stopped watching Homeland after three seasons - because it was too unrealistic to watch any longer - Carrie would never have been allowed to do all the off-the-cuff stuff she got away with again and again. That was Jack Bauer levels of ridiculousness.

 

 

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Watched E1 of the first season of the Expanse as I've been reading the series and am on Book 6 now. Struggled to get through the first episode because 1) the acting and music seem a little forced and 2) I'm far enough into the books where I get the dynamics between the recurring characters and am not terribly interested in watching them come together for the first time when I've been immersed with them for some time now. Will try and give the whole first season a shot but I think the first book was my least favorite of the series so if it's all based on that... well not sure.  I did like the space / ship visuals, particularly one shot where the ship did a flip and burn. Watching actual ship movements with real world physics was more fascinating than I thought it would be and I'm hoping they had the budget to have more scenes like that.

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5 hours ago, WarGalley said:

Watched E1 of the first season of the Expanse as I've been reading the series and am on Book 6 now. Struggled to get through the first episode because 1) the acting and music seem a little forced and 2) I'm far enough into the books where I get the dynamics between the recurring characters and am not terribly interested in watching them come together for the first time when I've been immersed with them for some time now. Will try and give the whole first season a shot but I think the first book was my least favorite of the series so if it's all based on that... well not sure.  I did like the space / ship visuals, particularly one shot where the ship did a flip and burn. Watching actual ship movements with real world physics was more fascinating than I thought it would be and I'm hoping they had the budget to have more scenes like that.

The show moved to Amazon in later seasons and I think the budget got upped when that happened. I love the series and certainly don't think it ever ends up looking cheap at all

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Watched a few videos on the history of the SYFY channel and they have always appeared to be in a constant state of flux, moving from making high quality sci fi with decent budgets to low cost dirt that you might watch if you were extremely drunk, and back again. 
 

I don’t remember the show looking much better on Amazon, but I have barely noticed the effects so I guess that it looks ok

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10 hours ago, Kalbear said:

Warrior nun needed way less talking and more kicking ass. It is super pretty and really dumb and preachy. Definitely not buffy.

I've watched 6 episodes so far. Definitely a lot of wooden dialogue, making the acting mediocre at best. It becomes somewhat watchable at episode 4.

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