Watch, Watching, Watch -- Hold 'em, Fold 'em, When to Walk Away

[Zorral]

Continue to hang on to the remotes, Watchers -- it's November already.  Will we be thankful for what it brings to our screens?

Highly recommended before it leaves HBO, The Witches of Eastwick (1987) adapted from the John Updike novel of 1984 -- It's a Four-Star film: Cher, Susan Sarandon, Michelle Pfeiffer =and Jack Nickolson in the role he was created to play, the Devil.   Remarkably sharp and appropos for today.

[Corvinus85]

I watched The Forgotten Battle on Netflix that portrays some event related to the Battle of the Scheldt when the Allies made the port of Antwerp available for shipping following the port's liberation. I suppose the title has merit, because I'm not familiar with this battle, so I don't know how truthfully it covered some of the events.

Spoiler

It's obvious the movie didn't go into many battle details, since much of the movie follows various characters ahead of the battle. 

I feel they should have had a Canadian POV instead of a British guy inserted into the Canadian side. But I liked the Dutch woman's POV, and the Dutch loyalist's POV did a good job early to show how people fell for the Nazi propaganda, and he had a nice redemption moment. 

 Last night I watched the first episode of Squid Game to see what all the fuss was about. I liked it and will keep watching. 

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

Just finished season 1 of Norsemen on Netflix. Not gonna lie; I like it a lot. But wow is this show strange. It's a bit like Letterkenny only with lots of indiscriminate killing and a whole spectrum of rape jokes I didn't know existed. Clearly there's something subtle and weird going on in Norway that I don't understand. 

[Zorral]

Another cheery and sunny series, this time not New Zealand or Australia, but France.,

Commissair Magellan (2009) season 1. French policier series set in small, fictional town of Saignac, ‘somewhere in northern France’ (that’s a lot of France ... though the ‘ac’ suffix says southern France), shot around Lille.  4 seasons of the 7 up on Amazon Prime. So nice to have another non-gory French series, now that I got through seasons 1 and 2 (the only seasons Acorn gave us, out of the 9 or so!) of Candice Renoir.

This will definitely help me get through the closing in days of later fall - early winter.

Renoir is a divorced single mom; Magellan is a single dad - not sure if his wife died or she left, coz I've just started the first episode. Renoir's in the south -- Montpellier, by the Med -- whereas he's up north, no sea, yet this was "French Flanders" back in the day, i.e. the Low Countries. So there should be water, ya?  Both of these series are dependably enjoyable and fun. With really interesting clothes!
 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

@Isis,

Good call. I'm about halfway through Ginger Snaps and it's a lot of fun. Also, I dated someone for a brief time who looks almost exactly like Katharine Isabelle. It's hard not to picture Chels in the movie, especially when she at the time was dead set on becoming an actress (she's a nurse now). 

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

Peaky Blinders is awesome. It's like a less-rape-y Once Upon a Time in America in a foreign language. I pride myself in being able to understand some pretty heavy accents, but I'd have no idea what the hell was going on without subtitles. The wedding in season 1 made me tear up a little. 

[RumHam]

21 Jump Street is on Netflix. those two movies were so much better than they had any right to be, 

[ithanos]

In the last week I got to see Shang-Chi in cinema - Simu Liu and Awkwafina make for a good pairing. Enjoyed it, good fun, but not much more.  

Then I re-watched The Harder They Fall because it was a blast the first time - and it was just as good second time round. I found Jaymes Samuel's earlier working of the same characters in They Die by Dawn (2013) on youtube. As a 49min feature its not very good, but it has some nice interactions that are worth checking out if you're a fan of the genre. And if anyone wants to see Michael K Williams playing Nat Love in a Western shootout, with some saloon standoffs and repertoire then this is your only chance.

And today I got to see The Eternals, by Chloe Zhao.  I was apprehensive as to how they would introduce a team of ten new characters + Kit Harrington and have the viewer be remotely interested enough in their fates to sustain the 2hr 37min runtime. But Zhao manages to direct attention to each character, in the backdrop of real settings, along with the prerequisite action & CGI of a Marvel feature, with success. It won't please everyone, but I absolutely loved it. I expect a lot of discussion on this in the MCU thread. And as usual, there's a mid-credits and end credits scene. Oh and The Celestials are astoundingly celestial, see it on the biggest screen you can!

[Spockydog]

The North Water on iPlayer is cracking stuff. Brilliantly adapted script, fantastic performances, and amazing scenery. Perhaps even a career best performance from Colin Farrell.

Watching it, I did find it sad that filming a story in this type of setting will be impossible in around 10 - 20 years.

 

[Astromech]

On 11/2/2021 at 3:53 PM, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

Just finished season 1 of Norsemen on Netflix. Not gonna lie; I like it a lot. But wow is this show strange. It's a bit like Letterkenny only with lots of indiscriminate killing and a whole spectrum of rape jokes I didn't know existed. Clearly there's something subtle and weird going on in Norway that I don't understand. 

I recommended this to a co-worker the other day. It's hilarious and only gets better with more Jarl Varg.

 The Harder They Fall was a fun film. Maysville had me laughing out loud. I was scratching my head trying to figure out where I had seen Jonathan Waters before until I remembered giving up on Lovecraft Country after two episodes.

[polishgenius]

The Harder They Fall is excellent, and it's got as charismatic a cast as has been assembled for a very long time.  

[Corvinus85]

I got to the 6th episode of Squid Game to find out the English subtitles are kinda messed up. Fucking shit! But it is a damn good show.

[Annara Snow]

Finished Midnight Mass. I loved it. It started a little bit slow but then really picked up with episodes 3 and 4. The cast is amazing, especially Hamish Linklater. And Samantha Sloyan does a great job playing one of the creepiest characters on TV recently.

 Another masterpiece by Mike Flanagan. I really couldn't tell which one I liked best, The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manr or this - they are all great. Like Hill House and Bly Manor, it does a great job using horror tropes to tell an emotional character-driven story about a topic - in this case, religion (and spirituality and death). And I'm so glad I listened Rahul Kohli and muted the words Midnight Mass before finishing the show and didn't get spoiled, 

Spoiler

Because there's no way that a bunch of people wouldn't have been going on about "Vampires! Vampire priest!"

Also finished season 1 of Counterpart. Excellent SpyFy show, kind of "what if The Americans was about parallel universes". I just hope season 2, which I'm starting now, won't end too cliffhangery, since I know it was cancelled.

I'm also watching some horror movies from my Belated Halloween 2021 Watchlist (stuff I planned to watch around Halloween but didn't get the time). Started with Midsommar. Florence Pugh is really  fantastic/ The movie is extremely sucessful in being super creepy (I don't know if I'd call it scary - this is a type of horror that is based on being creepy), even much earlier than anything ooutright horrible starts happening in the community. There's something inherently creepy about seeing a bunch of people all dressed in identical white clothes and smiling.

And if Hollywood horror movies have to exoticize foreign countries and use them for horror, I'm perfectly fine if it's Scandinavia's turn instead of the usual suspects like Eastern Europe/Balkans or non-European cultures... 

[Zorral]

Benedict Cumberbatch, amazon prime original scripted bio film of Louis Wain, turn of the (19th-20th) C artist of cats. Narrated by Olivia Coleman.

http://museums.eu/article/details/107058/daily-art-story-louis-wain-the-man-who-drew-cats

Review of film here:

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-electrical-life-of-louis-wain-2021

~~~~~~~~

Vulture labeled the Harder They Fall "a fun mess."  This viewer, however, found no fun at all in the pointless slog of over-the-top fantasy violence of fantasy badassery -- ya you betcha a guy gets a prolonged beating to his gut and chest, while hung naked from the ceiling and then talk, much less just get up and get dressed and walk around.  Feh.  You betcha though the Yardies in Kingston will Lurve this flick, and not just because of the many reggae trax. 

Such a wonderful cast and this was all they thought of do with it? When there are really such splendid western tales that could be told with an all black cast of actors. Feh.

[JGP]

7 hours ago, Annara Snow said:

 Also finished season 1 of Counterpart. Excellent SpyFy show, kind of "what if The Americans was about parallel universes". I just hope season 2, which I'm starting now, won't end too cliffhangery, since I know it was cancelled.

I was pleasantly surprised at how well S2 ended given the situation. It'd probably be the most disappointing cancellation in recent years, for me-- if Amazon's Patriot hadn't also been axed. 

[Ran]

Been awhile. Lets see...

La Belle Noiseuse, directed by Jacques Rivette (who was nominated for the Palme d'Or and won the Grand Jury prize), starring the very dignified Michel Piccoli as a famous, reclusive painter who abandoned the titular painting years earlier when he married his model (played by Jane Birkin). Then enter a young, up-and-coming artist visiting the more famous artist, bringing along his beautiful girlfriend (Emmanuelle Béart) whom he volunteers as a new model. This leads him to start again. It's a very long film, almost 4 hours, but I was drawn to it when I read that Akira Kurosawa considered it one of the two best films of the 90s (the other is Hana-bi by Takeshi Kitano -- funnily enough, shared a dinner table with Richard K. Morgan once and he admitted he couldn't get into Kurosawa but raved about Kitano), wishing he himself had directed it.

Most of the film is Piccoli drawing and painting nude studies of Béart, a fact that meant that something like 75% of the filming schedule was devoted to the scenes because not only did Béart pose for the filming where Piccoli is in frame, but she did it again for the artist Bernard Dufour who provided the footage of the actual artwork being in process for the most part. Suffice it to say, she's unclothed a lot of the time, but the film never lingers lasciviously and Piccoli's artist is too focused on his creation, and so the audience follows suit. Part of why Kurosawa loved it, and part of why I do, is because the core of the film is the struggle of an artist to create something, to put his vision out there in as true a way as possible. Really interesting, and for me never boring. I loved the way it ended.

For a complete change of pace, I think rewatched Bevery Hills the Cop, a film I probably haven't seen in 20 years. I forgot how dark it could be, with the on-screen execution of Axel Foley's friend. Murphy's a joy to watch in this film, part of that string of huge hits he made all based on his comedy chops and incandescent charm. It's a quintessential 80's film.

I finished up the latest season of What We Do In the Shadows, and found it as hilarious as ever. The appearance of Donal Logue as the vampire Donal Logue is just... too perfect, in the last two episodes. And some real twists and turns, as well, this season. One of the best comedies on television right now, I think.

Finally watched Denis Villeneuve's Dune and I'll say more in the dedicated thread, but... me and him, we  just don't click. The poetry he strives for generally misses me. The technical chops are all there, the budget is all on the screen, but this rendition of Dune has a coolness to it that's dominant over much of the film that makes it feel inert. It gets a lot better and more intriguing in the last 10-15 minutes, though. And to give credit where credit is due, this could be the first Dune adaptation I've seen where someone was really able to convey the conflicted feelings Paul has about his destiny.

Binge re-watched Cowboy Bebop. Nothing to say other than it's largely as amazing as I remember it, even though there's a couple of episodes which came across as filler in a way they didn't the first time I watched them. I have no fondness for the idea of adapting this to live action, and have no intention of watching Netflix's remake, but at least it's gotten Yoko Kanno to compose some more music and I hope they release a soundtrack. "Ballad of the Fallen Angels", which introduces Vicious and reveals the importance of Julia, is an amazing episode... not least because of the beautiful "Green Bird" credited to Gabriela Robin ... who appears to be a pseudonym for Kanno herself. Even if you aren't usually a person for animation, if you enjoy pop culture remixing, this thing blends noir with science fiction and even westerns to a highly entertaining degree.

Started the new Curb Your Enthusiasm season and enjoying it very much. Larry setting up a pilot at Netflix is kind of funny, all things considered. The opening episode, featuring Albert Brooks's "faux-funeral" and another funny turn by Jon Hamm, is my favorite of the two so far. 

Finally, just finished László Nemes's Oscar and Grand Prix-winning Son of Saul, an engrossing and heartbreaking Holocaust narrative following the titular character, a Hungarian Jew (played by the poet Géza Röhrig whose lined face and sorrowful eyes communicate tremendous amounts over the course of the movie) who is part of a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz, a group of camp prisoners who have been impressed into assisting the Nazis in their Final Solution, feeding the coal for the furnaces and scrubbing the gas chambers clean before the next victims come. It is very bleak and dark. Much of the story turns on Saul witnessing a youth miracuously surviving the gas chamber, only to be coldly suffocated by a Nazi doctor. He then makes it his mission to attempt to give this boy a proper Jewish funeral, with a rabbi speaking the Kaddish and the body committed to the earth rather than to the flames. Why? For his own, complex reasons.

The film takes place in the first week of October in 1944, for historic reasons, but I'll say no more on that. Of particular note, the cinematography from Mátyás Erdley is exquisite: filmed on 35mm, with a 40mm lens for the most part, a lot of the film is done with extremely shallow depth of field, and at Academy ratio. This helps obscure some of the horror, especially in the first minutes, as bodies and Nazi guards are blurred shapes as Saul moves among them, reflecting the way he and other Sonderkommando must have become completely deadened by their work on clearing out and burning bodies, bodies of fellow Jewish men, women, and children, knowing that they themselves would only last a few months before they, too, were culled.

 

 

[WarGalley]

13 hours ago, Annara Snow said:

Also finished season 1 of Counterpart. Excellent SpyFy show, kind of "what if The Americans was about parallel universes". I just hope season 2, which I'm starting now, won't end too cliffhangery, since I know it was cancelled.

Season 2 is good. I had the same fears about the ending but it closes the story in a satisfying way while leaving room for a Season 3. All in all, very solid story for 2 seasons. I'm generally surprised the show didn't get more acclaim. 

5 hours ago, JEORDHl said:

I was pleasantly surprised at how well S2 ended given the situation. It'd probably be the most disappointing cancellation in recent years, for me-- if Amazon's Patriot hadn't also been axed. 

In my circles, people at least had heard about Counterpart. I generally didn't find people who have heard of Patriot despite it being an awards-contending type show (at least in my opinion). Have to blame the marketing and lack of proper advertising.

[JGP]

16 minutes ago, WarGalley said:

In my circles, people at least had heard about Counterpart. I generally didn't find people who have heard of Patriot despite it being an awards-contending type show (at least in my opinion). Have to blame the marketing and lack of proper advertising.

Patriot was my jam. I was one part pissed and two parts sad it got dropped. Definitely near the summit of top shows no one watched. 

Man… I’m actually getting pissy about it all over again.

[Zorral]

Narcos Mexico, season 3 is up on netflix.  I cannot figure out why I like these Narcos series so much, with all their relentless violence committed on behalf of addicting people to poison.  It's the same as with Gomorrah, which I also like so very much.  It has a lot to do with the casting and with the locations and how well the locations are utilized.  Surely there is some other reason(s).

Also up on Netflix this weekend is Amina (2021) Don't confuse it with another film of same title from 2012, featuring a psychiatrist, or yet another film with that title (2019), from Turkey). This is a Nollywood period film, featuring the historical and / or folkloric 16th century warrior queen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amina

Warning: Twitter is enraged because the actors are speaking English instead of Hausa, w/English subtitles, and the actor who plays Amina, isn't of the correct background. 

[RhaenysBee]

I finished the Harry Potter films and the Grindelwald one. The latter was miles better than the first installment of the fantastic beasts, but it was still like Swiss cheese, more plot holes than story. I won’t watch the last film though. 

I also watched Beetlejuice, for god knows what reason. It was… interesting. It was certainly eye opening and educational to see the origins of Tim Burton and spot all the details referenced in later Tim Burton films and other similar productions.

Edward Scissorhands was another film I watched for the first time. It was mind blowing. There was more story in that film than in a full modern trilogy. It was incredible. I’m in love with it.