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

[Ran]

22 hours ago, BigFatCoward said:

What we do in the shadows finally started in the UK last week and I didn't even know. 

Ready for more Jackie Daytona, regular human bartender?

(I kid -- no Jackie shenanigans this season!)

[horangi]

6 hours ago, Ran said:

Finished the final season of Narcos Mexico. It felt a bit closer to The Wire, in some ways, compared to pretty much any of the prior seasons or the original show, a little more clinical and less sexy, perhaps as a result of the primary figures of the drama being less wrapped in mythos than Pablo Escobar or Félix Gallardo.

 

I've only watched three episodes so far, and am enjoying it.  It does feel like they are working with a bit less source material leading to some of the scenes being drawn out more than in previous seasons (the wedding for example).  Man I hope that they dont turn Walt into another McNulty-clone of downward spiraling bad life choices and alcoholism- get on the plane to Chicago and support your, obviously more centered, S/O!

[SpaceChampion]

Been watching the new 4400 series.  It's a bit slow but I'm mildly interested.  How different is it from the original (which I haven't seen), does anyone know?

[BigFatCoward]

1 hour ago, Ran said:

Ready for more Jackie Daytona, regular human bartender?

(I kid -- no Jackie shenanigans this season!)

Now I'm worried that this is an elaborate double bluff and he will turn up. 

[Ran]

16 hours ago, Zorral said:

Such as, in the minor biz of Marta, the jinetera-performer, who couldn't be wearing that kind of lingerie, even if she had money, because it wasn't there to buy.

I didn't get the sense that Amado was her first caballero, so probably gifts from a past client.

I do agree everything looked a bit too fresh and new. I don't know where they filmed the "Cuba" scenes -- just some place in Mexico?

16 hours ago, Zorral said:

More though, is that the Cuban government wouldn't have allowed the Colombianos in. 

So, I'll just say for the sake of saying that that reports from officials and intelligence and drug enforcement organizations out of Colombia, Mexico, and the US all state that the Colombian cartels were regular visitors to Cuba.

Of course, things are muddied by the fact that in 1989 the Cuban government charged a number of senior officials and military figures with having been involved in drug smuggling, admitting that the cartels had infiltrated the government and military. The Castros decried their crime and trials were held. 

Amado Carrillo was reportedly a regular visitor to Havana -- with reports varying from his meeting Colombian cartel contacts there (this from Luis Navia, a Cuban-born drug runner for the Colombian and Mexican cartels) to being a guest of Castro's at El Laguito  and staying at the Hotel Nacional with a large entourage to his having a Cuban wife/girlfriend there which may well have been why he visited so often (both per a Congressional report). That last, I guess, is where the character of Márta came from.

[Fez]

On 11/7/2021 at 11:03 PM, Fez said:

Saw the first episode of Arcane, a new  animated series on Netflix. Apparently it's based off the lore of League of Legends, a game I've never played. But this is far better than the normal quality of video game adaptations so far. It's a solid western animation and if you told me it was an original IP I'd totally believe it. All the elements of it are good, but the thing that really stands out is the animation itself, especially the faces. I've never seen animation that expressive.

There's 3 episodes out so far, with 2 more batches of 3 being released weekly.

And now I've seen the other two episodes that are out so far and, oh yeah, this show's a good one. And certainly goes darker than I was expecting. 

[Annara Snow]

18 hours ago, SpaceChampion said:

Been watching the new 4400 series.  It's a bit slow but I'm mildly interested.  How different is it from the original (which I haven't seen), does anyone know?

Very different so far: the original started with everyone appearing, the same as the new show, but  then, if I remember correctly, we didn't spend much time with them being locked up anywhere, they just went to their homes or wherever else and then they started to manifest superpowers. I think one guy in the pilot ended up doing something disastrous and had to be killed for being a danger, and it's only then that the police started monitoring the 4400 as seeing them as a danger, but even then, I don't think there was ever a time when they were all locked up in one place like this, let alone from the start. 

I guess the original show reflected the time it was made, when the law enforcement agencies and authorities in general were portrayed more sympathetically across the board, while the new show has the authorities react in panic from the start and have the 4400 locked up, refusing to let them contact their families, just because they don't know what's going on, and before they have even learned that these people have superpowers. I've seen some people criticize the show for that and say that this was "unrealistic"... to which my reaction is the Thor meme, "is it though?"

Also, the leads in the original show were two FBI agents, played by Joel Gretsch and Jacqueline McKenzie. but here the authorities are represented by a parole officer and a social worker (see above, the situation of 4400 is very different here). 

The new show also  leans more heavily into the 4400 all being minorities and/pr marginalized people, which wasn't the case with the original show, but the representatives of the authorities - who are mostly antagonistic to the 4400 - are also mostly POC and LGBT characters.  (The one criticism I've seen that I agree with is that the 4400 we've met are all either black, or white people who are otherwise marginalized/a minority, without other ethnic groups, but we've only gotten to know a handful of 4400 so far, so they could correct that later.) The original show had that theme Mahershala Ali's character and his backstory and his interracial love story, but the rest of the cast was mostly white.

One similarity that's noticeable is that both shows have a charismatic, morally ambiguous character poised to become a leader of the 4400 - in the original it was Billy Campbell's Jordan Collier, who became something of an almost religious figure. Here it is an actual preacher.

[Zorral]

Up on netflix, Montford the Chickasaw Rancher.

https://thecinemaholic.com/is-montford-the-chickasaw-rancher-based-on-a-true-story/

Quote

...  It is the third independent venture by Chickasaw Nation Productions, a production company that aims to showcase the indigenous culture of the tribes through feature films such as ‘Pearl’ and ‘Te Ata.’....

~~~~~~~~~~~

Another element in Narcos Mexico season 3 is how clearly it is shown how important to the cartels' trade and expansion is NAFTA. They plan for the implementation of NAFTA as much as any other cross-border business. Additionally, it really showcases the courage and heroism of Mexican journalistas in their attempts to inform the public the connections between the cartels and the government.  So many Latin American journalists have been killed who have done this, yet they persist. But now, having gotten through the 6th episode I'm so terrified on behalf of the cop, Vicktor, and the journalista, Andrea, that they will be tortured and executed, I don't know if I can keep on.  This happens for real in the lives of these kinds of people trying to do the right things for people and country, and we've seen it in graphic detail in previous seasons.

[GallowKnight]

On 11/9/2021 at 12:51 PM, Ran said:

Highlight of the show for me was a new character, a Juarez police officer and sometimes-stick-up artist named Victor Tapía played by Luis Gerardo Méndez. His story turns into something of a noir detective story as he ends up finding himself pulled towards investigating the unexplained murders of young women that began to become common in Juarez around this time, and as far as I know continue to this day. Méndez's presence is magnetic, IMO, his performance as Victor filled with a deep sense of sorrow at the state of the world he lives in and his finding something to hang on to by trying to set at least this one thing right.

Really, because that part did not work for me at all. I get why they wanted to tell that story. But to me it just ended up being too disconnected from the rest of the story. It felt to much like it's own thing instead a part of the whole story.

Otherwise I liked season 3 of Narcos Mexico well enough. It felt a little bit like a lot of stuff we had already seen in previous Narcos season, a lot of plot-points and situations that felt like repeats form earlier. Especially the DEA stuff. And while I quite liked Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the season somewhat lacked a strong central Cartel-character, since it felt like Amado got to share the screen-time with his fellow cartel leaders a bit more than Escobar and Felix Gallardo got. I liked that we got to see the newspaper side of things too, showing the dangers that come with being a journalist reporting on the drug cartels..

[williamjm]

5 hours ago, Annara Snow said:

Very different so far: the original started with everyone appearing, the same as the new show, but  then, if I remember correctly, we didn't spend much time with them being locked up anywhere, they just went to their homes or wherever else and then they started to manifest superpowers. I think one guy in the pilot ended up doing something disastrous and had to be killed for being a danger, and it's only then that the police started monitoring the 4400 as seeing them as a danger, but even then, I don't think there was ever a time when they were all locked up in one place like this, let alone from the start.

In the original show I think they were in quarantine to begin with but they were allowed to leave early in the first season, I think it's only afterwards that they discover the 4400's new abilities.

[Ran]

45 minutes ago, GallowKnight said:

Really, because that part did not work for me at all. I get why they wanted to tell that story. But to me it just ended up being too disconnected from the rest of the story. It felt to much like it's own thing instead a part of the whole story

I do feel like they connected it up, in the sense

Spoiler

that his role as a mole for the DEA both led to his personal involvement in killings of people Vicente Carrillo suspected to be moles, and hence his final fate, and the reason he was a mole was to get access to information to try and solve his case.

More generally, yes, the story served as a thematic counterpoint to the narco wars and high-level corruption -- while all that is going on, at street level all this other terrible crime is going on that gets no attention.

I thought the fact that the serial killer he did find was actually an American was a little too on the nose, but I'll allow it when he then realized that he had only found one of many people who had been getting away with the brutalization and murder of vulnerable women.

 

[Ramsay B.]

I saw Antlers today. It was decent. It felt like a modern day leshen side quest from The Witcher 3. Like to a t. I kept picturing Geralt coming in during it.
 

I also watched The Night House a little while ago. It was good too, but kind of confusing to me. Don’t know if it’s supposed to be taken literally or not? But worth a watch if you like a suspense mystery. It also gave me a great song from the 70’s I never heard before(The Calvary Cross- Richard and Linda Thompson).

[TheLastWolf]

First time I'm totally agreeing with a rogerebert.com review by someone who isn't the late critic

Cry Macho

Spoiler

Especially the seduction part

Cry

[Annara Snow]

14 hours ago, williamjm said:

In the original show I think they were in quarantine to begin with but they were allowed to leave early in the first season, I think it's only afterwards that they discover the 4400's new abilities.

Yes, I don't remember the details of the pilot. But I know the show got past the quarantine pretty quickly and without focusingon it much, and it was nothing like this. 

[SpaceChampion]

Saw this posted on reddit and seems like a good movie to track down.

https://youtu.be/w3EWhDcl-Yg

Do youtube videos no longer embed here?  Anyway, its a scene from a Korean movie A Bittersweet Life.

[Ran]

@SpaceChampion

Embedding works, but Youtube videos can be set to not allow embedding by the uploader.

[Zorral]

21 hours ago, Ran said:

Spoiler

the serial killer he did find was actually an American was a little too on the nose,

 

Spoiler

Quite a few Americans were found doing this, but few got prosecuted for reasons. But I don't recall the details from when there was serious coverage of these terrible, on-going crimes -- it was so awful, I tried to just keep to the outlines.  But there has been serious work done:

https://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1608&context=sjsj#:~:text=A 2004 conference held at,met untimely%2C often brutal deaths.

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

 

 

[Isis]

On 11/8/2021 at 7:45 PM, williamjm said:

It looks like all the episodes of the new season are available on the iPlayer, athough I've only watched the first one so far.

I was waiting for my other sofa to finally get delivered six months after ordering it, before starting on this. But they messed up again today, so just the one sofa for another three months I guess. So much festive viewing ruined by one rubbish sofa company. 

And we still haven't watched Squid Game because of the rubbish subtitles. Is that problem never going to be resolved?

[GallowKnight]

22 hours ago, Ran said:

I do feel like they connected it up, in the sense

  Reveal hidden contents

that his role as a mole for the DEA both led to his personal involvement in killings of people Vicente Carrillo suspected to be moles, and hence his final fate, and the reason he was a mole was to get access to information to try and solve his case.

More generally, yes, the story served as a thematic counterpoint to the narco wars and high-level corruption -- while all that is going on, at street level all this other terrible crime is going on that gets no attention.

I thought the fact that the serial killer he did find was actually an American was a little too on the nose, but I'll allow it when he then realized that he had only found one of many people who had been getting away with the brutalization and murder of vulnerable women.

 

Spoiler

I though both Vicente Carrillo and the DEA-guy felt tacked on just to give it some connection to the rest of the story. I do think the subject matter itself is interesting and well worthy of being examined on-screen. It just didn't gel with very well with the rest of the season.

 

[RhaenysBee]

I’m watching Catch Me If You Can it’s beautiful and heartbreaking.