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Watch, Watched, Watching: Festival Time!


Zorral

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1 hour ago, Mark Antony said:

Only a couple scenes were hard to see for me but a far cry from the long night ep of got

I've acquired an HDR TV since then, so can't compare directly, but did need to turn off the lights to be able to see what was happening in this episode clearly.

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Sherwood (2022) series hit Britbox USA today.  It got rave reviews (at least those I saw were) in the UK.  Stuffed with actors quite familiar from other Brit tv, it grabs the viewer (at least this one). A Midlands miners' strike out of Maggie's 1984 policies, in a smallish town in the Nottingham area, have all along had repercussions within families and the community, and the miners.  Who stayed working (most there it seems) and who did not.  It comes to a boil suddenly right now with the murder of one of the community who went out of the mine in '84 -- murdered with an arrow.  Other arrow events follow.

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@Zorral you've no idea how this thread title came useful. So 24 hrs after settling in my university hostel they kick me out for unexpected holidays, it's not a major festival this part of the subcontinent tho. So headed to the nearest theatre that met my quite lofty standards (settling without IMAX) and caught Ponniyin Selvan I. No date sadly save for family. I'll update that shortly in the relevant thread soon ;).

So PS1 was even more magnificent and spectacular than I expected. 2200 odd pages compressed without losing essence, can't wait for the conclusion next year. Even the archaic wordplay humour isnt lost in the subs I noticed. The cinematographer lives upto the name of his namesake. Some shots have to be seen to be believed, fricking paintings. 

Its minting money too like never before for an Indian film which is not set originally in Hindi. I'm gonna catch it in IMAX again if it lasts till Diwali which I'm sure of. The cast is understated by the word ensemble. Some performances are surely career bests. 

The action set pieces are not grandiose or epic for the most part barring few overhead/eagle eyes but close, gritty and realistic. The VFX is almost imperceptible unlike RRR. The music though deserves another Oscar for AR Rahman, Slumdog Millionaire getting his first 2. Hans Zimmer would be put to shame by the BG score and the songs are all beautiful. The subs capture the original lyrics adequately. Horsies and elephants galore Z ;)

The ladies are breathtakingly beautiful, the men roughened to suit the setting perfectly. The director's magnum opus is truly befitting it's reputation and reception. All the cast and crew are giants in their own right. Action, choreography, editing, lyrics and dialogue, costunes n art direction (lit), stunts and I could go on. It may be the second most expensive film from India (peanuts budget by Hollywood standards) and may take the same place in box office (Dangal is unshakable, see the numbers you'll know why) gross too. 

Swords and Sandals discussion a few weeks back, here's a mighty contender. 

Can't wait the 9 months for the second part, already shot tho.

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11 hours ago, TheLastWolf said:

Swords and Sandals discussion a few weeks back, here's a mighty contender. 

Can't wait the 9 months for the second part, already shot tho.

O lordessa, I am so envious!  Thank you for sharing your experience.  I am so glad to have this to look forward to watching, whenever that happens -- please o ye ghodds and ghoddessas of the screen, may it be soon.

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I thought the lighting in the last episode of HotD was indeed quite bizarre, but I still thought the episode itself was rather good. In particular, I was rather pleasantly surprised by (book spoilers)

Spoiler

Their change in Laenor's end. It's quite nice for that character to be able to get away and do his own thing. I wonder whether he'll play a role in the restitution of Viserys in future seasons.

 

The only baffling thing was (show spoilers)

Spoiler

Alicent's attack on Rhaenyra. I find that hard to jive with the world depicted in the books. I think physical violence would have cost here dearly.

I also watched the latest episode of Rick and Morty. They really hate fortune cookies, but what a funny episode.

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The lighting wasn't too bad for me, but I know lots of my friends had issues and it's certainly not an isolated thing. I really enjoyed the first half of the episode, and I think I connected with some of the characters more than I have previously. I still think it suffers from pacing issues even within the episode given how the last third of the episode plays out, but I enjoyed this episode more than the last couple.

I was reading an AV club review of the episode, and I certainly agree with this bit, which is why the show to me is a solid 7/10, but not more.

Quote

Do Corlys and Rhaenys ever talk about anything besides her getting passed over for the throne? Perhaps the greatest strength of Game Of Thrones was its ability to build whole worlds behind almost every member of its sprawling cast—and it’s one that House Of The Dragon consistently fails to deliver on.

I would say the best shows bring that interiority of it's characters forward, but I think HOTD has really struggled to do this except for 2-3 characters.

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I watched See How They Run. I thought it had some very amusing scenes in it and worked quite well as an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery.

Reading up on things afterwards one bit that felt like a joke really did happen:

Spoiler

As shown in the film the producer John Woolf did buy the film rights to The Mousetrap with a clause that it couldn't be made until the West End run of the play came to an end. This has not turned out to be a good business decision.

 

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Lost thoughts: 

Spoiler

I can’t quite decide if I dislike Desmond or Juliet more. Juliet is certainly the more interesting character and by far the less annoying one. Though Desmond still doesn’t make my skin crawl the way Ana Lucia did. 

I feel sorry for Sawyer. He’s trying to do the right thing and grow and be a better person and things just don’t play out his way. 

I thought the Charlie death arc was super lackluster. 

As for Nikki and  Paulo that was one disturbing episode. I hoped for a while that they would address their death again and play a bit more with the idea that when you don’t have a super doctor on a tropical island lethal mistakes can and will happen and you will never know. Which is an interesting topic to explore. 

this has been an issue from the introduction of the character and you can explain away some of it with fear and xenophobia, but it’s still beyond me how Rousseau spent SIXTEEN years on this island without so much of a plot device as amnesia and NOT realize that her daughter is being brought up in the literal next village, when she is clearly competent enough to trap random people and extract information from them. She trapped Sayid and questioned him about Alex and she even trapped Ben, are you trying to tell me she never trapped anybody before to question them about Alex? Also, why wouldn’t Ben have this woman killed years and years and years ago? It just doesn’t make any sense at all. 

I like how the fates of these characters are so interetwinefd, it’s clever and unpredictable yet believable . I’m not sure I like that all the agreeable, mediocre  and morally white characters turned out to have  something dark in their past. some… no, actually most people are just boring and ordinary and don’t have manslaughter, blackmail, bribery, murder, theft, mafia, drug addiction, abandoned priesthood, alcoholism in their past. The most interesting thing in a lot of people’s lives is that they gave back an A list celebrity the item they dropped on the floor or became pastry chefs after twenty years in physics research. You need that kind of contrast to believe that Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Sayid and Locke are so badass and interesting. All the people with mediocre lives have sort of disappeared from the show: Michael and Walt are gone, Boone and Shannon are gone, Claire and Sun have been amped up because someone thought they were too boring (they weren’t) and 

I’m bored with Jack’s failed marriage and Sun and Jin’s marital struggles. I kinda want to get back to Hurley and Sayid a bit more and I wish Eko was still around because he was an interesting character I would have liked to spend more time with. Ben is an amazing villain but I kinda feel that we are stretching the story a bit too much and a bit too thin. 

 

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Beast was a disappointment. Conceptually it was a good idea and Elba was solid, but the film drags at times, doesn't make sense at others and it's the rare film that has you rooting for one of the kids to die. 

I'm not going to tell you to skip it, but if the genre interests you, The Ghost and the Darkness is a far better film. 

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2 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Beast was a disappointment. Conceptually it was a good idea and Elba was solid, but the film drags at times, doesn't make sense at others and it's the rare film that has you rooting for one of the kids to die. 

I'm not going to tell you to skip it, but if the genre interests you, The Ghost and the Darkness is a far better film. 

Did you finish BB?

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