Watch, Watched Watching : 2023 is going to be unstable!

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

8 hours ago, Nictarion said:

The fashion show always kills me.

We won’t talk about your Mighty Ducks slander! 

I'm not a big fan of the series, but when I do see one of them it's a total nostalgia trip. Minneapolis has changed a lot in 30 years. 

 

I was late to season 2 of The White Lotus. Holy shit is this insane. I like this season a lot more than the first. 

[Teng Ai Hui]

9 hours ago, Nictarion said:

The fashion show always kills me.

We won’t talk about your Mighty Ducks slander! 

Yes, that was a good scene.  Also, I liked that a fashion show (or at least something similar to one) helped them win the championship.

[Veltigar]

On 1/9/2023 at 1:21 PM, RhaenysBee said:

Nicholas Hoult was brilliant. I used to dislike him a lot in earlier movies, then I watched The Great and realized he was born for dark/weird comedy. For me he was the (most) entertaining part of The Menu. 

Ah, I think I first took notice of him in the underrated A Single Man with Colin Firth. Since then he's continuously and consistently done his best to take part in interesting films (barring the Young X-Men films).

He shares that with Ana Taylor Joy I think. Peaky Blinders, the Queen's Gambit, Last Night in Soho, even something like The Northman (which I think didn't quite live up to its promise) was at least a supremely interesting film in concept.

Both actors have reached a point where I'm intrigued by a project in advance if I know they are in it. 

On 1/9/2023 at 11:31 AM, Heartofice said:

I'm glad I'm not alone in this then. It seemed to have been raved about as one of the movies of the year. Not sure why.

Luhrman has a lot of blackmail material on people in Hollywood 

For me, Luhrman is basically a reversed Midas figure. Hated his version of Romeo and Juliet when I was forced to sit through it, got bored to tears by Australia and I think I didn't like Moulin Rouge either (though it is been so long ago that I barely remember anything about it).

He somehow manages to make promising ideas less interesting/engaging for me. Where I see the names of Hoult and Taylor-Joy linked to a film and get excited, I see his name and get filled with trepidation.

I remember seeing that first Elvis trailer and being blown away by it. The person who cut that trailer has clearly sold their soul to Satan, because it was such a great trailer and yet totally unrepresentative of the finished product.

On 1/9/2023 at 11:31 AM, Heartofice said:

It did however make me spend an hour on YouTube after, watching the real thing, and then you realise there is no substitute for that. This Elvis movie is a bit like one of those crappy stage shows where they include all of an artists greatest hits and but done by musical performers and its just worse. This is like.. Mamma Mia or something.

Luhrman did use some of Elvis' actual vocals in the film IIRC from the IMDB trivia I read. The lead only does the singing for Young Elvis, but later on they use recordings from Elvis and mix it with Austin's voice.

For me Austin Butler was by far the best thing in the film. I thought he was very good as Elvis and one of my major gripes with the film is that it refuses to zoom in on its best performer/most intriguing character to devote the majority of its runtime to Tom Hanks Big Momma's house take on Parker.

[GallowKnight]

13 hours ago, Teng Ai Hui said:

I had an urge to watch a childhood favorite, Slap Shot.  It was still a lot of fun, though some of the name-calling wouldn't be allowed nowadays.  Those duck team movies can gtfoh.

Greatest sports-movie ever.

[Heartofice]

46 minutes ago, Veltigar said:

 

Luhrman did use some of Elvis' actual vocals in the film IIRC from the IMDB trivia I read. The lead only does the singing for Young Elvis, but later on they use recordings from Elvis and mix it with Austin's voice.

For me Austin Butler was by far the best thing in the film. I thought he was very good as Elvis and one of my major gripes with the film is that it refuses to zoom in on its best performer/most intriguing character to devote the majority of its runtime to Tom Hanks Big Momma's house take on Parker.

Austin I think got the voice right, I think he got a lot of the mannerisms right, and he got the moves right. But he's no Elvis. He doesn't have 'It'. That kind of spoiled it for me. I will never know whether he would have been better in a movie that actually required him to act rather than look iconic for almost 3 hours.

[Zorral]

The Mayfair Witches (2023) season 1 – AMC. The first episode was intriguing enough I’m looking forward to the second one.

Whereas I gave up on Interview With the Vampire after about two episodes, and skipping over a lot of the third;  It was grisly, obscene and disgusting in way too many scenes, and I know the story.  Not even Eric B. could save  Interview for me, as good as he was as the journalist.
 

[Spockydog]

Okay. Vikings: Valhalla. Six episodes in, and the silliness is now off the charts.

And I have to say, I wasn't expecting to see this guy again.

Still enjoying it enormously, despite the silliness.

 

[RhaenysBee]

So I’m watching it, I’m watching it. Angel. But I don’t know what’s happening because I’m mindless scrolling my way through reels and H&M, or having anxiety attacks or I just don’t particularly care about anybody because I can’t find a hook. I will take it to season 2 to give it the fair chance I gave Buffy too.

[dog-days]

18 minutes ago, RhaenysBee said:

So I’m watching it, I’m watching it. Angel. But I don’t know what’s happening because I’m mindless scrolling my way through reels and H&M, or having anxiety attacks or I just don’t particularly care about anybody because I can’t find a hook. I will take it to season 2 to give it the fair chance I gave Buffy too.

Have Lindsey McDonald or Lilah Morgan shown up yet? It's been ages since I watched Angel, but I recall them being some of my favourites. 

[RhaenysBee]

1 minute ago, dog-days said:

Have Lindsey McDonald or Lilah Morgan shown up yet? It's been ages since I watched Angel, but I recall them being some of my favourites. 

Nope, we’ve got some actress who wants eternal youth and fangirl Cordelia. 

[Cas Stark]

15 minutes ago, dog-days said:

Have Lindsey McDonald or Lilah Morgan shown up yet? It's been ages since I watched Angel, but I recall them being some of my favourites. 

Lindsey was a great, great character. Those were the first couple of  years I think and the best. But I HATED, Fred, so there you .  I thought Lindsey and Lilah were from the first season but maybe 2nd?  

[Kalbear]

Angel really didn't get hooks into me until Season 2. After that it was just better than Buffy almost all the time, especially with the quality of Big Bads and some of the guest stars and links. Season 4 was in particular an amazing season at the time, one of the very first really good serialized TV shows out there in a world where most everything was not particularly serial. 

Lindsey and Lilah both appear in Season 1, but aren't particularly big parts of it. 

[Mindwalker]

I watched the first two episodes of Three Pines. Good but depressing.

PS I don't trust

Spoiler

Pierre.

Edited bc I confused names.

[Underfoot]

2 hours ago, Cas Stark said:

Lindsey was a great, great character. Those were the first couple of  years I think and the best. But I HATED, Fred, so there you .  I thought Lindsey and Lilah were from the first season but maybe 2nd?  

You... hated...Fred? D:

[Cas Stark]

6 minutes ago, Underfoot said:

You... hated...Fred? D:

Yes. Not as much as I hated Dawn, but similarly, I hoped and hoped she would get written out of the show.

[RhaenysBee]

9 hours ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

Angel really didn't get hooks into me until Season 2. After that it was just better than Buffy almost all the time, especially with the quality of Big Bads and some of the guest stars and links. Season 4 was in particular an amazing season at the time, one of the very first really good serialized TV shows out there in a world where most everything was not particularly serial. 

Lindsey and Lilah both appear in Season 1, but aren't particularly big parts of it. 

Well this is why I’m willing I take it to season 2 after I was convinced to dust it off and try again. 
 

don’t know about Fred but I thought Doyle was super boring and I couldn’t give an F. 

[Veltigar]

I recently read an article detailing how the death of celebrities is being used as a proxy to estimate the impact of CoVID in China since the government over there is not releasing reliable data.

Famous professors, opera singers and others are dropping like flies. In that article I also read that the screenwriter of 1991's Raise The Red Lantern had recently passed away. It's on Roger Ebert's greatest movies list and I have been meaning to watch it for some time, but I never quite got around to it.

In honour of Ni Zhen (the unfortunate screenwriter), I decided to finally give it a go. Raise The Red Lantern was directed by Yimou Zhang and stars Gong Li as the Fourth Mistress, the lead character of the film. Both Zhang and Li have had a hand in some of the most well-regarded high-brow films coming out of China in the culturally relatively open 1990s (and Zhang afterwards directed some pretty famous Wuxia films like Hero).

My conclusion after seeing Raise The Red Lantern is that I should definitely try to watch some more of their work. Li for instance also stars in Farewell My Concubine which has also been on my watch list for ages. I would definitely recommend watching Raise The Red Lantern, but be aware that it is quite a sad film.

It tells the tale of a promising young woman who is forced to drop out of university after the death of her father. She becomes the fourth wife of a rich and older man. The film tells her sad story of oppression through the competition that develops between the Fourth Mistress and the Master's other wives.

Zhang is a master of colour and the film's claustrophobic and cloistered setting is incredibly gorgeous to look at. Gong Li's subdued performance as the gorgeous, yet tragic lead is great and the supporting characters manage to hold their own against her. The script is also quite clever and it does a great job at highlighting the mechanisms of abuse that have developed throughout the centuries to keep the patriarch's wives submissive.

It is the type of film that a Chinese director in China is probably unable to make in the more censorious ecosystem that has developed under the new management. The world is a poorer place because of it.

[Cas Stark]

Gong li is great in everything she's ever been in, like Michael Caine, no matter how bad the movie, they will be good.

[TheLastWolf]

Hurt Locker

Just perfect

[dog-days]

4 hours ago, Veltigar said:

My conclusion after seeing Raise The Red Lantern is that I should definitely try to watch some more of their work. Li for instance also stars in Farewell My Concubine which has also been on my watch list for ages. I would definitely recommend watching Raise The Red Lantern, but be aware that it is quite a sad film.

I loved Farewell My Concubine when I watched it ten years ago. I wasn't expecting a mash-up of 1984 with traditional Chinese opera, but it worked very well.