Watch, Watched, Watching: Festival Time!

[Corvinus85]

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.

Edited November 7, 2022 by Corvinus85

[dog-days]

5 hours ago, Veltigar said:

Good to hear that this is your impression. I started the fourth season last week and I find it really hard to get into again after binging the other seasons during the pandemic. It's probably me not remembering correctly, but it feels more juvenile in the early episodes in the beginning of season 4 than I remember from previous seasons (and not in the Pixar/Disney Renaissance kind of way where there is plenty in the background for parents to enjoy).

With Dragon Prince I think it was a mixed experience. Partly it did get a bit more complex and mature as the season progressed; partly it was me resetting my expectations, just seeing that DP wants to be a classic innocent/idealistic adventure and accepting that. (Admittedly, some of the writing is really clumsy, as @A True Kaniggit highlighted, but sometimes I can't tell if that's a deliberate choice - the writers showing melodramatic teenagers being melodramatic). 

[Cas Stark]

Rewatched the Haunting of Bly Manor and liked it even more the 2nd time around.

[Isis]

Accidentally half-watched five or six episodes of Manifest today because I didn't get why there was this buzz around a show on Netflix, yet only the fourth season is available in the UK. Now I just want to know what happens. It's hard to care that much for any of the characters and the performances are far from stellar. It's like a poor man's Lost. Has anyone else watched this?

Something I saw today that was cool, was Luke Evans singing on Strictly this weekend - I don't watch the show, someone mentioned it so I watched that section on youtube. I knew that he could sing I guess but I didn't realise that he actually did it seriously...Might need to watch that live action Beauty and the Beast now. 

[kissdbyfire]

3 hours ago, Cas Stark said:

Rewatched the Haunting of Bly Manor and liked it even more the 2nd time around.

Hey Cas, nice to ‘see’ ya.

Been meaning to watch that for a long time but forgot all about it. Will defo watch after this. 

 

I binge watched Inside Man on Netflix over the weekend. Was even excited about it b/c Tucci & Tennant. It went like this:

ep 1: hmmm this could be really interesting 

ep. 2: …

ep. 3: WHAT

ep. 4:

YMMV

 

 

[Week]

34 minutes ago, kissdbyfire said:

I binge watched Inside Man on Netflix over the weekend. Was even excited about it b/c Tucci & Tennant. It went like this:

ep 1: hmmm this could be really interesting 

ep. 2: …

ep. 3: WHAT

ep. 4:

YMMV

Co-sign on this. It was as if a pitch for a new 10 season serialized show suddenly cut to 4 episodes after accidentally casting Tucci and Tennant. 

That music - 

[kissdbyfire]

23 minutes ago, Week said:

Co-sign on this. It was as if a pitch for a new 10 season serialized show suddenly cut to 4 episodes after accidentally casting Tucci and Tennant. 
 

Agree. 
 

Spoiler

I was literally laughing out loud when the bus ran over Mary, the vicar’s wife. B/c by then the whole thing had totally gone off the rails for me. 

23 minutes ago, Week said:

That music - 

Yeah, big yikes. 

[williamjm]

I watched The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent which I thought was a lot of fun, particularly whenever Cage and Pedro Pascal are together on screen. The acid trip sequence was particularly funny.

[Werthead]

12 hours ago, lacuna said:

The current popularity of anime/manga will probably remedy that in a few years, when tons of weeb kids decide that they want to learn Japanese and become underpaid and underemployed jobbing subtitlers/translators.

I've been hearing variations on this since the 1990s and it's never really come to pass. Mainly because if you actually can learn Japanese, there's probably a ton more and much better-paying jobs you can get than an anime translator.

I was listening to an interview with Carl Macek (aka the Accursed One in anime fandom), who ran Streamline Pictures in the 1980s and 1990s that brought tons and tons of anime to the States for the first time, and his reporting of how hard it was to find translators at all, and then find good ones, was quite something. He even pointed out that they had to deliberately do translations that were not "great" because fans would start screaming themselves stupid if they changed names or things even when they were translated incorrectly (the main example in Aura Battler Dunbine when the Japanese used the wrong name for one of the Orkney-inspired tribes and the translator reinstated the original - and much easier to say - name and the fanboys went ballistic). The funniest story was the audio director on Akira getting incredibly confused when one of the female characters put on a guy's jacket and had the male voice actor saying her lines in the long-shot because he hadn't worked out they'd just changed clothes (and that was in the original dub in cinemas and on media releases for many years before they did a whole new dub with a better translation).

[Secretary of Eumenes]

On 11/3/2022 at 12:05 AM, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

That clip will never get old. ETA: I can't remember but don't those people end up orbiting the ship with the massive poop cloud? I have to rewatch that episode. 

I'm loving the latest season of Avenue 5.

"I will make your reign a reign of blood." 

I've said it before and I will say again that Armando is a goddamn motherfucking genius!!!

[dbunting]

Currently watching Squid Games. I see why people got so in to it, but so far I don't see it as some master piece. On ep 7 now.

I will say I want to smack the person who does the voice over for the woman that hooked up with the snake face tattoo guy. Can't remember their numbers.

Also

Spoiler

Is there going to be a reveal that the guy leading this was 001 all along? When they showed him sitting at the desk you could see gray hair under the back of his mask and he was shot off screen, I think we saw all the rest die on screen?  

I guess I don't want anyone to answer that as I'll find out later tonight, just a feeling.

[Cas Stark]

Watched first 2 eps of The Peripheral.  Meh.  It's like every other Amazon production, okay, not great.  It's no Westworld, that's for sure. 

[Iskaral Pust]

Picking up on the prior page discussion of dubbing and sub-titles: the streaming services really need a prominent indicator for shows originally in foreign languages.  Amazon Prime especially has a ton of moody and/or gritty crime shows from Europe but the dubbing voice actors are just so bad.  I think Gomorrah has been the only show so far that was worth watching through sub-titles.

[Luzifer's right hand]

2 hours ago, dbunting said:

Currently watching Squid Games. I see why people got so in to it, but so far I don't see it as some master piece. On ep 7 now.

I will say I want to smack the person who does the voice over for the woman that hooked up with the snake face tattoo guy. Can't remember their numbers.

Also

  Hide contents

Is there going to be a reveal that the guy leading this was 001 all along? When they showed him sitting at the desk you could see gray hair under the back of his mask and he was shot off screen, I think we saw all the rest die on screen?  

I guess I don't want anyone to answer that as I'll find out later tonight, just a feeling.

I never watch stuff dubbed nowadays even if I don't understand the language.  Stuff vibes much better that way I feel and I watched a lot of the Korean/Japanese fantastic stuff that shows up on Netflix.

Back in the day when the took their time to dub stuff in German some of it was pretty decent(I actually love the dub of TOS) but now that that stuff is released more or less simultaneously across the globe I find newer stuff nearly unwatchable. I can't imagine how bad stuff must be in English as there was never a decent dubbing industry in the first place.

Edited November 8, 2022 by Luzifer's right hand

[Heartofice]

8 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

Watched first 2 eps of The Peripheral.  Meh.  It's like every other Amazon production, okay, not great.  It's no Westworld, that's for sure. 

Phew, I thought I was totally alone in that. I haven't even bothered watching the third episode, I just haven't seen anything in there that was especially interesting or gripping. The limited amount of time in the virtual future world is cool, but I don't like any of the characters and I don't feel engaged by it at all. 

2 hours ago, dbunting said:

Currently watching Squid Games. I see why people got so in to it, but so far I don't see it as some master piece. On ep 7 now.

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.

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

3 hours ago, Iskaral Pust said:

Picking up on the prior page discussion of dubbing and sub-titles: the streaming services really need a prominent indicator for shows originally in foreign languages.  Amazon Prime especially has a ton of moody and/or gritty crime shows from Europe but the dubbing voice actors are just so bad.  I think Gomorrah has been the only show so far that was worth watching through sub-titles.

That said, dubbing these days has come a long way.

I decided to rewatch Arcane in greek with subs. It is incredibly well done. I'm not sure about most of the dialogue (I'm the black sheep who's greek is pretty bad), but the voice actors were incredible. I was also surprised that there were in-universe terms that actually got translated into something; like, "Chem-Barons" and, "hextech". Usually that stuff sticks out like a sore thumb.

[Spockydog]

4 hours ago, Cas Stark said:

 It's no Westworld, that's for sure. 

You got that right. 

[TheLastWolf]

American Psycho again

Spoiler

He killed no one, he killed everyone, everyone but Leto, blah blah. The last time I nearly dozed off, on TV. This time a better experience, delayed horror watchlist, but no clearer on Bateman 

 

[dog-days]

Watched Enola Holmes 2 and probably liked it more than the first one. It's not brilliant - it's not even good - but it's an easy, undemanding watch, especially if you're multitasking, in my case making pomanders because I wanted to trump Enola's nineteenth century with my fourteenth century. 

It was a good cast though they were present with various levels of commitment. The director seems to have had a word with David Thewlis along the lines of: "yeah, remember V. M. Varga in Fargo? Do that. Exactly that. Don't even take the branding off." Helena Bonham-Carter, Henry Cavill and Adeel Akhtar did proper work, though the latter was underused. 

The romance subplot with human-placeholder Lord Tewkesbury was a yawn - it wouldn't be fair on the YA genre to call it YA. Still, I appreciated the bits of the story that took inspiration from the Matchgirls' strike of 1888. Shamefully, I hadn't heard about it until last night. 

I had mixed feelings about the colour-blind casting. Generally I'm all for it, but because this is late Victorian England, it did seem strange that no one said anything at all about any of the characters played by people of colour. Apparently race/racism just isn't a thing in the Enola-Holmes-verse. And since the series applies its Victorian coating very thinly, largely for the sake of the costumes in fact, I suppose it shouldn't matter. It's just odd to bring up one very serious aspect of social history (industrial relations and exploitation), but not even indicate the pervasive racism. 

Edited November 8, 2022 by dog-days

[Heartofice]

5 minutes ago, dog-days said:

I had mixed feelings about the colour-blind casting. Generally I'm all for it, but because this is late Victorian England, it did seem strange that no one said anything at all about any of characters played by people of colour. Apparently race/racism just isn't a thing in the Enola-Holmes-verse. And since the series applies its Victorian coating very thinly, largely for the sake of the costumes in fact, I suppose it shouldn't matter. It's just odd to bring up one very serious aspect of social history (industrial relations and exploitation), but not even indicate the pervasive racism. 

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.