Watch Watched Watching: May The Fourth be with you!

[Veltigar]

I just started season 6 of Justified and I'm absolutely devastated after episode 1 

Spoiler

So long Dewey Crowe, you shall be missed.

The episode where his kidneys were "stolen" is still the high-water mark for this show.

EDIT: I'm glad I watched Castlevania in between season 5 and 6 of this show. I needed the break if its all going to be this depressive. 

[briantw]

9 hours ago, 3CityApache said:

I binge watched all five seasons first, and then read all 8 books in about three weeks. Worked fine for me.

I think the show has changed enough to make both worth investing your time in.  The book goes into much more detail and, as expected, has a lot more characters, but the show has done a wonderful job of consolidating dozens of side characters into a few and they're honestly stronger for it.  Ashford, for example, is a much, much better character on the show than in the books, and I loved that they kept him around after his book counterpart disappeared from the series and gave him an actual arc.  I barely remembered him from the books, but he's one of my favorite show characters, and the actor they cast did an incredible job with the role.

Plus, we can probably assume the book and show endings will be quite a bit different.  They may arrive at the same place, but it will surely be by different means.  

[briantw]

53 minutes ago, Veltigar said:

I just started season 6 of Justified and I'm absolutely devastated after episode 1 

  Reveal hidden contents

So long Dewey Crowe, you shall be missed.

The episode where his kidneys were "stolen" is still the high-water mark for this show.

EDIT: I'm glad I watched Castlevania in between season 5 and 6 of this show. I needed the break if its all going to be this depressive. 

When Raylan asks Dewey if he can piss and he says, "They took my kidneys, Raylan, not my dick!"  

[DMC]

1 hour ago, briantw said:

When Raylan asks Dewey if he can piss and he says, "They took my kidneys, Raylan, not my dick!"  

"....You mean I have four kidneys?!?"

[Aemon Stark]

22 hours ago, Karlbear said:

You should keep watching until a part of season 2 happens. Trust me, you'll know what I'm talking about. Then go back and read Leviathan Wakes.

Alright, this is what I'll do! Keeping in mind that, despite owning a copy, I'm not exactly sure where it is in the big pile of books we have sitting on the floor in the home office...

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

Just finished the latest Alex Gibney Documentary The Crime of the Century on HBO. Two parts on the Opioid epidemic. Highly recommend.

The Columbian cartels and El Chapo had nothing on these guys. The lesson: If you're a white American with friends in Washington and you do your business out of an office, you get to be psychopath with impunity.

[DaveSumm]

Anyone watching Invincible on Amazon Prime? Just finished episode 5 and I’m really enjoying it. I’m not usually into superhero universes where they drop you right in the middle of widespread and accepted heroes/villains (there seems to be hundreds who just casually show up from week to week) but it works here for some reason. Maybe because it’s a straight lift of DC, the ‘Guardians of the Globe’ couldn’t more obviously be the Justice League if they tried. Stick around till after the first couple of credits of each episode, the end of episode 1 is pretty crazy.

[Isis]

On 5/15/2021 at 8:09 AM, Heartofice said:

Finished season one of The Wilds. I wasn't going to continue but for some reason I ploughed through. It did improve I will give it that. I was initially put off by the format of the show which really bugged me. I didn't think I could stomach having to do the whole 'each episode is a different backstory' thing, and really I think the shows biggest problem is how it is structured. 

Ahhh. You liked it.

Last night we watched the long-awaited The Woman in the Window. I explained to my husband beforehand about the author of the book being a big fraud and he was like, 'well, I'm not sure that we should watch it then!' Personally, I had bought and read the book before the New Yorker article was published so I gave my money but I didn't know any better. We were watching on Netflix last night, not specifically paying to see this movie so I don't feel as if we were giving the dude any more money. Also I see that Jake G is gonna play the guy in a film. 

Anyway, decent film. Quite close to the book in many ways, though they trimmed down a little part of the protagonist's life which I think didn't harm the story. I think the film probably improved on the book in some ways - doing cool stuff with colour and Hitchcockian themes. Performances were good. Pretty brave of both Amy Adams and Julianne Moore to be filmed looking 'older' (Hollywood doesn't usually allow women to appear old in this way - unless that is literally the purpose of their character) - I found that quite interesting. Easy money for Gary Oldman though. Not gonna make it into his top 20 or 30 performances list.  

[Cas Stark]

Watched a documentary on TCM about Tab Hunter.  There was nothing artistic or interesting in the style of the documentary, but it was a nice, bittersweet story about a seemingly very nice guy who had a lot of ups....massive beefcake movie star, hit singles....and downs....tough childhood, being a closeted gay man in the 50s, blacklisted by Jack Warner, doing dinner theater....who ends up apparently still a nice guy with no bitterness about the 'down' parts of his life, living in Santa Barbara with his partner of several decades and some horses.  So, a happy ending. 

[Teng Ai Hui]

Recently, I watched The Wilds.   I enjoyed the character study elements of the series.  However, when the focus of the story was on the "Dharma Initiative", I always lost my suspension of disbelief.  How were all those schemes funded?  How could all of the logistics be organized by only 6~8 people?

I also found an interesting documentary series called the Gods of Snooker.  I'm anxious for the third and final part to be broadcoast next week.

[Veltigar]

18 hours ago, briantw said:

When Raylan asks Dewey if he can piss and he says, "They took my kidneys, Raylan, not my dick!"  

 

16 hours ago, DMC said:

"....You mean I have four kidneys?!?"

Best quotes of the entire series and I really must admit that

Spoiler

I didn't see his death coming. It's just such a great character that I didn't really think they'd mess with him, certainly not that early in the season. 

It's good writing though. It makes sense for Boyd to cap him and eliminate the threat and at the same time, I feel like the writers really signal that Boyd's villainy is finally becoming more transparent to the audience.

Back to watching In the Arms of an Angel from Sarah Mclachlan set to Dewey Crowe compilation scenes 

 

[Heartofice]

5 minutes ago, Teng Ai Hui said:

Recently, I watched The Wilds.   I enjoyed the character study elements of the series.  However, when the focus of the story was on the "Dharma Initiative", I always lost my suspension of disbelief.  How were all those schemes funded?  How could all of the logistics be organized by only 6~8 people?

 

It was partly funded by the rich woman she went to see. I think a bigger question is why anyone is funding it and what it’s overall aims are because it all seems quite confused. I had to hand wave the idea that anyone was buying into what she was saying.

[GallowKnight]

11 hours ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

Just finished the latest Alex Gibney Documentary The Crime of the Century on HBO. Two parts on the Opioid epidemic. Highly recommend.

The Columbian cartels and El Chapo had nothing on these guys. The lesson: If you're a white American with friends in Washington and you do your business out of an office. The you get to be psychopath with impunity.

I watched that too, very good. Equal parts interesting and infuriating.

[SpaceChampion]

1 hour ago, Teng Ai Hui said:

Recently, I watched The Wilds.   I enjoyed the character study elements of the series.  However, when the focus of the story was on the "Dharma Initiative", I always lost my suspension of disbelief.  How were all those schemes funded?  How could all of the logistics be organized by only 6~8 people?

I enjoyed the main teen cast character study as well, but the woman in charge of the project appears to be a caricature of a feminist, apparently wanting to create a society without men, and aiming to prove it with this experiment.  I wouldn't be surprised if a future stage of the experiment is to impregnate one of the girls with a baby conceived from two biological mothers.

The question i have is how sincere are the producers in all this?  Or are they actually hyper-evangelicals like the makers of The Mist tv show which seemed to just want to say atheists are evil and will bring hell on Earth?  Is this show just going to say "feMiNaZIs arE eViL"

[Heartofice]

16 minutes ago, SpaceChampion said:

I enjoyed the main teen cast character study as well, but the woman in charge of the project appears to be a caricature of a feminist, apparently wanting to create a society without men, and aiming to prove it with this experiment.  I wouldn't be surprised if a future stage of the experiment is to impregnate one of the girls with a baby conceived from two biological mothers.

The question i have is how sincere are the producers in all this?  Or are they actually hyper-evangelicals like the makers of The Mist tv show which seemed to just want to say atheists are evil and will bring hell on Earth?

What I also don’t understand is that the project was clearly a total failure, the girls didn’t do what she expected at all. So what’s the next move? ( guess we saw some of that at the end of the season)

 

[Annara Snow]

14 minutes ago, SpaceChampion said:

I enjoyed the main teen cast character study as well, but the woman in charge of the project appears to be a caricature of a feminist, apparently wanting to create a society without men, and aiming to prove it with this experiment.  I wouldn't be surprised if a future stage of the experiment is to impregnate one of the girls with a baby conceived from two biological mothers.

The question i have is how sincere are the producers in all this?  Or are they actually hyper-evangelicals like the makers of The Mist tv show which seemed to just want to say atheists are evil and will bring hell on Earth?

She doesn't want to create a society without men. She supposedly wants to prove that women are superior or whatever. And she's about to

conduct the same experiment with teenage boys in season 2.

It's all some kind of a sociology experiment for her. But there's zero indication that she wants to eliminate men - especially as she not only has several men working forher on the experiement, but has an awful fratboy son that she appears to love.

She also seems to have been able to sell that experiment to the girls' parents by portraying it as a sort of correctional facility for the girls'"bad" behavior - in addition to the fact that the whole thing depends on her taking away the girls' agency, effectively imprisoning and mistreating them. All in all, she is a huge hyporcrite.

I don't know what her ultimate goal is - which is why I'm holding my judgment about that element of the show before season 2 comes out. 

[Zorral]

3 hours ago, Teng Ai Hui said:

Recently, I watched The Wilds.   I enjoyed the character study elements of the series.  However, when the focus of the story was on the "Dharma Initiative", I always lost my suspension of disbelief.  How were all those schemes funded?  How could all of the logistics be organized by only 6~8 people?

It also turned into Lost-type, i.e. open-ended until cancellation or something.  I liked it a lot up to the point of having all this run by, of course, a rogue feminist academic, feeding into at least three of the cray cray ultra right's fantasy delusions about women and about academia and about what feminism is and about women in general and girls in particular.  Totes creepy by then.

I found the girls' capacities for survival -- until magic luggage -- and their learning that in a community everyone is essential, with different capacity to contribute -- engaging.

The actors were good.

Interesting that everyone I know who watched this at my recommendation loved it too, up to the same point where I fell out of it -- the reveals that this was an experiment of a crazy feminist.  We all 'lost' interest then.

[Heartofice]

59 minutes ago, Zorral said:

It also turned into Lost-type, i.e. open-ended until cancellation or something.  I liked it a lot up to the point of having all this run by, of course, a rogue feminist academic, feeding into at least three of the cray cray ultra right's fantasy delusions about women and about academia and about what feminism is and about women in general and girls in particular.  Totes creepy by then.

I found the girls' capacities for survival -- until magic luggage -- and their learning that in a community everyone is essential, with different capacity to contribute -- engaging.

The actors were good.

Interesting that everyone I know who watched this at my recommendation loved it too, up to the same point where I fell out of it -- the reveals that this was an experiment of a crazy feminist.  We all 'lost' interest then.

Have to agree. The actors were all very good in the show (the girls anyway) and elements of it were well done.

The crazy feminist megalomaniac was by far the weakest element, a really thin character whose motivation was just bonkers. Who know's what she will do next season with Boys island, she was probably expecting them to kill each other.

But yeah I did appreciate that a show that could easily have fallen into the lazy trap of just portraying women as paper thin ideals rather than people chose to create actual characters for the girls and not just have them be 'inspiring', whilst also having a lunatic feminist as its villain.

[HexMachina]

On 5/18/2021 at 12:36 AM, Aemon Stark said:

I finally just finished the first season yesterday - took me quite a while to get into, possibly because the world-building is so dense it can be hard to figure out who's doing what and why. But it's great! I'd like to read the books too and have a copy of Leviathan Wakes - should I read first and then keep watching? Or does it matter?

I haven't read the books and decided to wait until the series is complete before doing so. From the threads about the TV show (which, if you want to follow, are very Good at spoiler tagging book content) I know there have been deviations from the book material. So it will be interesting reading them after the show. Usually I do the opposite, Read then watch and complain "BUT THAT'S NOT HOW IT HAPPENS IN THE BOOKS!"

There are some moments which can be a bit confusing or difficult to follow if you don't have the characters and plot lines in mind. I found I had to rewatch before the most recent season because I had forgotten so many details of what happened.

On 5/18/2021 at 2:05 PM, Heartofice said:

Searching for a new show on Amazon Prime last night.

Thought we’d give Bosch a go, it has six seasons and I’ve seen it mentioned a few times. Had to stop it after 15 mins, it felt like every cop show cliche contained in a tiny space of time. That it wasn’t a parody was quite concerning. From everyone referring to him by his last name, him actually calling his chief ‘chief’ and just the bog standard nature of everything I immediately decided I would never be able to stomach 6 seasons of that.

Next choice was Sneaky Pete. This was much better. Grabbed me straight away, I’ve always loved Giovanni Ribisi ( can’t figure out where I first noticed him, was it Saving Private Ryan or Friends?) but he’s really watchable in this and the first episode was a ton of fun.

I watched the first season of Sneaky Pete which I loved. Margo Martindale is always a delight to watch.

I think I lost my student amazon deal before the second season though so never got around to watching it

[3CityApache]

11 hours ago, HelenaExMachina said:

I know there have been deviations from the book material.

Some changes are inevitable, but generally The Expanse is a very faithful adaptation. They pretty much nailed it choosing the most important plot points and most changes boil down to mixing few book characters into one show character, some of them even more compelling than in the source material (Ashford and Drummer come to mind first).

I did the same btw, first watched tv show, and then read the books. Personally I expected the deviations to be much more substantial.