Watch, Watching, Watch -- Keep the change you filthy animal!

[Mexal]

13 hours ago, Fury Resurrected said:

How is nobody else talking about this show? It’s fantastic

We probably should have a dedicated thread on it. The show keeps coming up in here each week but gets drowned out after a few posts. It truly is one of the best shows in the past year. The odd number flashback episodes are on another level in terms of story telling and emotion. Brilliant show.

[Week]

4 hours ago, Werthead said:

Clint isn't the "main male character" of Hawkeye. It was set up as a passing-of-the-torch show from him to Kate, and they are two main characters, as in the source material.

These kind of "facts" and "logic" will whither in the face of increasing crime rate among men. Woe be.

[Rippounet]

Just watched Don't look up. Great movie. Well acted, funnier than I expected, and powerful overall. Also, if climate scientists are to be believed, it's quite accurate.

I don't really get some of the critics. Sure the film has limits, but it's not like we expect actual answers from Hollywood Netflix, do we? The movie still delivers a powerful indictment of hyper-capitalism/hyper-consumerism that can reach anybody, and that's still something.

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

The Other Side of the Wind: Bonkers. I don't care how edgy the new Hollywood was in the 70's. Those guys were miles away from the edge; looking at it through a telescope; seeing Orson Welles, smoking a cigar, drinking a cocktail, waving back at them. This is some kind of chaotic gonzo film making that's not really typical of his earlier work or anything else going on in Hollywood at the time.

The film-within-a-film stuff is so erotic that it would have been incredibly controversial by the standards of the day. It probably would have gotten an X rating at the time because of it (NC-17 in today's money). Between this and 'F' For Fake, I'm a big fan of what Welles was doing in the '70's. 

I also watched the companion Documentary, They'll Love Me When I'm Dead, Which I'd highly recommend. I love the anecdote concerning Welles' cinematographer, Gary Graver. Shooting on TOSOTW was so long and so intermittent that Graver had to take work to stay fed. Namely, 'B' movies and pornography. Welles needed Graver to shoot some scenes but he was busy working on a skin flick called 3 A.M. To get his cinematographer back, Welles helped him edit the film. Apparently Welles' main contribution was cutting together the lesbian shower scene featuring Georgina Spelvin. 

Neither his IMDB page nor his Wikipedia filmography page have been updated to reflect his uncredited contribution to that film.

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

46 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

I don't really get some of the critics. Sure the film has limits, but it's not like we expect actual answers from Hollywood Netflix, do we? The movie still delivers a powerful indictment of hyper-capitalism/hyper-consumerism that can reach anybody, and that's still something.

It seems his criticism is that the film isn't more partisan? I don't know. He was kind of all over the place. It hurt my brain to read it.

I always though the biggest mistake Al Gore made in An Inconvenient Truth was the montage of Republican politicians mocking environmental issues. It was a bit of party politics that only helped balkanize people into pro and anti science camps. 

[Kalbear]

2 hours ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

It seems his criticism is that the film isn't more partisan? I don't know. He was kind of all over the place. It hurt my brain to read it.

I always though the biggest mistake Al Gore made in An Inconvenient Truth was the montage of Republican politicians mocking environmental issues. It was a bit of party politics that only helped balkanize people into pro and anti science camps. 

I'm pretty sure the people watching al gore willingly were not the people who were turned off by anti republican anything. 

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

8 hours ago, Kalsandra said:

I'm pretty sure the people watching al gore willingly were not the people who were turned off by anti republican anything. 

Maybe. But it was a pretty high profile film and I know a lot of his critics certainly saw it. Either way, at best it was peripheral to the point the film was making; at worst it was poisoning the well. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

In the Heat of the Night is fantastic. I'm not sure there's much else to say really. 

[Isis]

On 1/7/2022 at 5:42 AM, Fury Resurrected said:

How is nobody else talking about this show? It’s fantastic

It's not available in the UK until nearly February. Even then it requires an additional subscription.

[Nictarion]

Rewatched Gone Baby Gone last night. So good. I liked The Town, but I think Ben Affleck kind of peaked as a director with his very first film. I didn’t really care for Argo much, and I’ve heard Live By Night is terrible. 

It also occurred to me that outside of True Detective S1 I haven’t really seen Michelle Monaghan in much since the mid-late 00’s when she was in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Gone Baby Gone. 

[Ramsay B.]

Damn, I forgot Live By Night even existed. It did suck from what I recall. Agree that GBG is great.

I think the last movie I remember seeing Monaghan in with a prominent role was Source Code.

[polishgenius]

55 minutes ago, Nictarion said:

It also occurred to me that outside of True Detective S1 I haven’t really seen Michelle Monaghan in much since the mid-late 00’s when she was in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Gone Baby Gone. 

She's kept popping up in Mission Impossible, but other than that she seems to have had a combination of intentionally lower-key stuff and an incredibly bad eye for choosing theoretically bigger projects - she's just been in film after film that has either been a massive bomb or been absolutely pasted critically, or quite often both.

[Ran]

I haven't started re-watching, but Kenny Hotz of Kenny vs. Spenny fame/infamy has been reposting high quality versions of the show (currently has S1 and S4 up) one his channel.

I have watched the first documentary in the Music Box series, which I heard about in a roundabout way and decided to check out. It's about Woodstock '99, which both huge but also a bit of a fiasco (not Fyre Festival level, though -- the event actually happened, everyone who was supposed to perform performed, etc). It had a lot of issues.

It's some weird kismet, as I started it a couple of days ago and today came the news that Michael Lang, co-founder of the original Woodstock and involved in both Woodstock '94 and Woodstock '99, passed away. He was quoted in the documentary about whether there'd be another Woodstock, and he didn't rule it out (an attempt to run one in 2019 had some setbacks and never took place).

The one thing that stuck out about the documentary were a couple of pretty young journalists (they would have been kids in '99) who had some very odd takes. In particular, a woman complained about the audacity of "baby boomers" organizing this event, repeatedly saying that no one asked for it... and I'm like, lady, what part of 350,000+ people in attendance did you not know about?  There obviously was a demand for it!

[briantw]

On 1/3/2022 at 4:22 PM, DMC said:

Just finished two episodes of the new Dexter.  I'm through episode 7 - there's 10 total and the ninth just aired last night.  Gotta say I'm enjoying it thus far.  It's not great, but it's shaping up to be a solid season of Dexter - definitely better than anything after the fourth season - and very interested how they'll conclude it.

The season wrapped up tonight.

It was...fine?  Certainly better than the pile of shit ending of the original series, but still a little disappointing and underwhelming overall. 

The end of the season felt really rushed too.  The first half moved too slow with not a whole lot happening, which left them cramming everything into the last couple of episodes and ending way too abruptly. 

Spoiler

Can we get more than half an episode of Dexter on the run after the cops find out who he is?  The entire last season of the original series should have used that premise, and it was super disappointing that we didn't get it here either.

Also, why the fuck would you tease a Dexter/Batista reunion and then not follow through?  

They definitely redeemed themselves for the original ending, which pretty much everyone agrees was a horrendous piece of shit, but even with like a decade to contemplate how to properly end it, they still went out with more whimper than bang.  

[Veltigar]

Finished season 4 of Cobra Kai two days ago. I have been saying this every year since the show's debut, but if you are not watcing this you are missing out!

Yesterday, I also watched The Electrical Life of Louis Wain (2021), the 2021 release of the yearly  Benedict Cumberbatch oscar bait film. I actually quite liked this one. Cumberbatch is always good at playing brilliant loonies, the film has some of the best cat acting seen in recent years and the director does imbue the proceedings with a little more flair and style than what we usually get from these type of films. If this film had come out at the time of the Imitation Game, I reckon it would have been a smash hit. All the lesser movies of a similar type that have come out over the past couple of years will however have poisoned the well for this film.

[Zorral]

Vera (2022) season 11, second half – third ep. A different style of shooting – much long distance, large open spaces, empty or very small numbers of people, often at long distances from each other.  It’s always interesting seeing how shows production, shooting and writing teams worked hard to keep filming, doing it as safely as possible.  It’s much more obvious on long-running shows like this one, where one can see starkly the changes.  More often than not, I’m impressed with the creativity this brought out in the production in order to do things as safely as possible, which acknowledges the reality of the pandemic, w/o focusing on it. Again, this seems to be the case for long running shows whose teams and actors are by now deeply embued with the aesthetics, the characters and the locations after all this time, like Vera -- and they're good at not drawing the viewers attention to their methods.  This is a case in which familiarity has not bred contempt, that's for sure.

New shows like WoT, interrupted in their season as was old show like Vera, aren't generally as successful at this, though McDonald and Dodds, did a great job too, though it was only their second season.

[Derfel Cadarn]

Shetland (based on books by same author as Vera) had to take a break in shooting.

Which led to some weird scenes. On minute its sunny (was set in May), next there was some light snow on the ground - and then it was sunny again!

[Zorral]

46 minutes ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

Shetland (based on books by same author as Vera) had to take a break in shooting.

Which led to some weird scenes. On minute its sunny (was set in May), next there was some light snow on the ground - and then it was sunny again!

Ya, I noticed that too -- and not the only show.  But then, even pre-pandemic shows have this happen often, such as very long-running, though no longer existent show, such as New Tricks.

We've also seen episodes in shows where it is supposed to be summer, but the actors' breath vaporizes, even indoors -- though usually that is within location castles and so on for period pieces. Reign was infamous for that.

[williamjm]

2 hours ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

Shetland (based on books by same author as Vera) had to take a break in shooting.

Which led to some weird scenes. On minute its sunny (was set in May), next there was some light snow on the ground - and then it was sunny again!

I know the Scottish weather is changeable but that might be going a bit far even for it.

[DMC]

18 hours ago, briantw said:

It was...fine?  Certainly better than the pile of shit ending of the original series, but still a little disappointing and underwhelming overall. 

The end of the season felt really rushed too.

I thought it was pretty solid, good even.  A fitting ending.  I agree it was rushed - especially everything that happened in the last episode.  I would have wanted that to be stretched out to at least a couple episodes instead of basically half an episode, yeah.  Other complaints...

Spoiler

This doesn't really matter but Angela telling Harrison to flee didn't make any sense.  Just say it's self defense, who the hell is gonna have a problem with that?  I guess they needed that for the driving away scene/narration, but she's abandoning (or I suppose forcing Harrison to abandon) the kid, once again.  And on top of that, she's taking Harrison's credit for killing one of the most prolific serial killers in history!

Also, I almost mentioned this last post, but how Angela connected Dexter to the Bay Harbor Butcher is really weak, and a retcon.  First, the ketamine is a blatant retcon, he repeatedly said he used m99 (sometimes requested by Patrick Bateman!) in the original series.  Second, from what I recall, when they recovered the BHB's bodies pretty sure almost all - if not all - of them had deteriorated to the point where no one was going to be able to identify wheelmarks.

ETA:  Oh, also, putting Lundy in the montage of innocent people he got killed didn't make sense.  That was Trinity's daughter, and if IIRC it was before Dexter had the chance to kill Trinity.  Did love Harrison saying "open your eyes and look at what you've done" though.  

That being said, those are relatively minor complaints.