Watch, Watched, Watching: Festival Time!

[Werthead]

Season 4 of The Dragon Prince was a big step-up from Season 3, which felt rushed and very illogical towards the end. They did kind of reset again to start a new story from scratch which helped.

I do wonder why it took 3 years to come back though. Hopefully they planned out the remaining four seasons in one go and are already way down the pipe on Seasons 5, 6 and 7 so we don't have massive waits for them.

[dog-days]

The creators have said that the next season will be here much sooner - it'll be more like the gap between seasons 1, 2 and 3. 

ETA: Excerpt from comicbook.com interview.

Quote

 

Interviewer: Switching to some big-picture questions, there was a bit of a wait between Season 3 and Season 4. Lots of stuff happened. The pandemic happened. I'm sure fans are going to want to know, should they expect a similar wait between Season 4 and Season 5, or are things moving at a steadier pace now?

JR: It will be much, much faster with the coming seasons for sure.

AE: It'll be much more like the pace of the first three, for the next few seasons, for all four.

 

 

[dog-days]

32 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

It sounds more strange to put in ahistorical casting as a device to describe racist events that didn’t happen. I dunno, just sounds like bizarre logic to me. Maybe characters being colour blind when you’ve purposely gone for colour blind casting makes more sense in this scenario.

Not quite sure what you mean? 

[Heartofice]

27 minutes ago, dog-days said:

Not quite sure what you mean? 

I mean the colour blind casting is purposefully ahistorical, you are meant to not notice the race of characters, that’s why it’s called colour blind casting. Doing that and then inventing a confected racial dynamic caused by your own ahistorical casting seems very manufactured and just odd. 

[dog-days]

48 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

I mean the colour blind casting is purposefully ahistorical, you are meant to not notice the race of characters, that’s why it’s called colour blind casting. Doing that and then inventing a confected racial dynamic caused by your own ahistorical casting seems very manufactured and just odd. 

I suppose I mean that it would have been possible to drop the colour blindness, keep the cast as it is but just have one or two characters remark on Bessie or Inspector Lestrade or Mae or Edith. Asians were in 19th century London, after all, at various levels of society, and Africans and people with African ancestry.

I assume that if the franchise goes on and there's an Enola Holmes 3 or 4, the films will eventually want to mention the Empire and some of the stuff that comes with it. Racism and imperialism aren't very fluffy subjects, but then, neither is phossy jaw. 

[Jaxom 1974]

Final episode of The Good Fight drops this week. I have zero idea how they wrap all of this up in an episode without another spinoff (which I'd love to see...there are some fantastic characters here...) or it all turns out to be a dream...but this is one of the better shows on television.  I'm sad to see if go.

[Zorral]

(15) WATCHING: THE TOP 10. JustWatch Top 10’s for October just became available after some glitches. These are the viewing rankings for the U.S.

Rank*	Movies	TV shows
1	Everything Everywhere All at Once	The Peripheral
2	The Thing	Doctor Who
3	Halloween III: Season of the Witch	Quantum Leap
4	Jurassic World Dominion	Avenue 5
5	Vesper	The Handmaid’s Tale
6	Crimes of the Future	La Brea
7	Significant Other	The X-Files
8	Alien	Severance
9	Interstellar	Orphan Black
10	Event Horizon	Resident Alien

*Based on JustWatch popularity score. Genre data is sourced from themoviedb.org

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

On 11/7/2022 at 5:19 AM, Corvinus85 said:

Finally saw Jurassic World: Dominion. What a clusterfuck. A movie with such a terrible, forced villain that even the writers knew it from the start that they had him stumble over his words all the time. The stakes were a joke when none of the main characters got even a bruise. Way too many survivors. Even the big dino fight at the end was forced and tired.

And yet, 2nd and 3rd place at the 2022 world wide and domestic box office respectively. And that's in a year where two MCU films, a Batman film and a Minions movie have already finished their theatrical runs. We're through the looking glass here, people.

I've only heard bad things. I'm tempted to watch this one. I caught the second half of the last one and it was like a CW TV movie with cool dinosaurs in it.

[Argonath Diver]

I've also only heard bad things and am quite content skipping it as I did the second one. And I consider Jurassic Park possibly the greatest time I ever had in a movie theater (12th birthday and I with zero exaggeration still have a once a year nightmare about a T Rex skulking through our woods outside my childhood bedroom. I love those nights).

The first one with the Boring Chris was thoroughly uninteresting and I basically disavow the entire new trilogy.

[dbunting]

13 hours ago, Heartofice said:

Looking back it feels highly overrated, and I know why. The first few episodes promise a very interesting take on social commentary, in a way that another South Korean production, Parasite was dealing with. I doesn't really delve into that topic at all though, except in a trite and obvious way. I guess the show was popular because the game element of it was iconic and word of mouth spread around about it, but in the end I can't say I'm especially looking forward to any more seasons.

Finished Squid Games and yeah, it was ok. I guess the only thing lost on me is the large amount of buzz it got. I kept expecting it to be more than it was and that never happened.

Spoiler

And yes the old man 001 was in on it, and yes the brother of the cop was as well. I didn't figure him to be the front man but rather a red shirt guard.

It's ending was ok, better than I had hoped for after it seemed to drag out for the last couple episodes.    Not sure if this is a new addition or not but there was a notice up after it was over that a season 2 has been confirmed.

[RumHam]

Quote

The streamer has also ordered a second season of his drama series The Watcher.

https://deadline.com/2022/11/netflix-expands-ryan-murphy-monster-franchise-renews-the-watcher-season-2-1235165592/
 

That's fucking bonkers. Granted half the stuff in season one was made up anyway, but how do you do a "based on a true story" show tell the entire true story and then do a second season? I'm morbidly curious what they'll come up with.

[Heartofice]

39 minutes ago, RumHam said:

https://deadline.com/2022/11/netflix-expands-ryan-murphy-monster-franchise-renews-the-watcher-season-2-1235165592/
 

That's fucking bonkers. Granted half the stuff in season one was made up anyway, but how do you do a "based on a true story" show tell the entire true story and then do a second season? I'm morbidly curious what they'll come up with.

General reaction to the first season was ‘wtf is up with that ending?!!’ so in some ways it’s good they are doing a second season

[Heartofice]

13 hours ago, dog-days said:

I suppose I mean that it would have been possible to drop the colour blindness, keep the cast as it is but just have one or two characters remark on Bessie or Inspector Lestrade or Mae or Edith. Asians were in 19th century London, after all, at various levels of society, and Africans and people with African ancestry.

 

Still, Enola Holmes massively exaggerates the number of non white people in England at the time. Whites made up 99.8% of the population even by the 1950s, the non white population was insignificantly small at the time of the tv show. 

I mean if you wanted to show that a non white character being treated in a racist way in Victorian London then it makes more sense to not do colour blind casting, because in a society where non white people are so rare , of course everyone is ignorant and racist.

If you then switch the dynamic and set up your world so that non white characters are commonplace and also able to be promoted to positions of power or are regularly seen in upper class balls, then it becomes quite confused messaging to try and make some point about how racist Victorian England was. 

But then that is the problem with a lot of these modern shows, they don't really think about what they are doing. 

[lacuna]

edit: NVM, never even saw the first one.

[TheLastWolf]

S1 of Family Guy

Spoiler

Whoa

 

[HexMachina]

Watching The White Lotus season 1, this show is bizarre in all the best ways. Jennifer Coolidge is everything.

[dbunting]

9 hours ago, TheLastWolf said:

S1 of Family Guy

  Hide contents

Whoa

 

Spoiler

Sweet

 

[TheLastWolf]

2 hours ago, dbunting said:

  Hide contents

Sweet

 

20 seasons 

[Raja]

On 11/8/2022 at 9:05 PM, dog-days said:

Asians were in 19th century London, after all, at various levels of society, and Africans and people with African ancestry.

 

Look, we can't have those black & brown people in public!

[Isis]

I managed to watched 15 ?16 episodes of Manifest, i.e. the entire first season. Honestly, how do shows like this get four seasons? The acting is average to poor. I definitely need to put this behind me and not watch S2.

We watched a couple of eps of Cabinet of Curiosities last night and I don't think I am going to bother watching any more of them. I just didn't get any enjoyment out of watching them. So far I've seen the first episode (occult story), the one with the rats (urgh, this was just so grubby and claustrophic) and the autopsy (bodies getting sliced open with scalpels? No thanks). Back in the early 2000s I pretty much stopped watching newly released horror films because they were either torture porn or pure jump scares. Horror is such a massive field - these are two aspects of it that I do not enjoy at all, so I don't watch those types of horror films any more. If Cabinet of Curiosities is going to be more on the body horror end of things then I won't watch any more of it. Plus, it's very 1980's Twilight Zone? I was expecting something more from it, to be honest.

In a completely different direction, I watched a couple of episodes of Dead to Me, not normally my cup of tea as it's a bit up its own arse. It's held my interest for two episodes anyway. Time will tell if I pick it up again.

Nearly forgot - I saw The School for Good and Evil, which I loved. I spent the entire film being entranced by Charlize Theron's incredible 1980's frosted make up. Lots of wacky make up and costumes in this film, if you're into that type of thing. thought it was a harmless, entertaining, modern take on fairy tales, with some decent performances and a few genuinely funny moments. Recommended if you want something light to cheer you up.