Watch, Watched, Watching: Watching Severance and working for Lumon

[Nictarion]

Did a rewatch of Midnight Mass. Loved it even more the second time through. Hamish Linklater was just fantastic in this. Wish he was in more stuff.

Probably going to do The Haunting of Hill House again next. 

[kissdbyfire]

5 hours ago, Nictarion said:

Did a rewatch of Midnight Mass. Loved it even more the second time through. Hamish Linklater was just fantastic in this. Wish he was in more stuff.

Probably going to do The Haunting of Hill House again next. 

I just rewatched it a few weeks back and feel exactly the same way, I liked it even more the 2nd time around. Great fun.

[karaddin]

On 3/5/2024 at 3:00 AM, Corvinus85 said:

I've been watching Constellation on AppleTV and caught up to the last episode last night. It's intriguing and Noomi Rapace and Jonathan Banks are pretty good. I hope it sticks the landing with its weird plot. The last episode certainly revealed a lot of what I've already been suspecting.

I started this and immediately binged all the current episodes and I'm loving it.

Anyone still smarting from Counterpart not getting a 3rd season should give this a try, it's a completely different premise but as of the 5th episode there's a few things scratching the same itch.

[Annara Snow]

8 hours ago, Nictarion said:

Did a rewatch of Midnight Mass. Loved it even more the second time through. Hamish Linklater was just fantastic in this. Wish he was in more stuff.

Probably going to do The Haunting of Hill House again next. 

It's absolutely criminal that he was snubbed for this by all sorts of awards. The miniseries too.

[Veltigar]

Watched the third episode of Shogun. Not as good as the two first ones, but it remains the most aesthetically pleasing show on television. Still mightily intrigued by it overall, though I hope the plotting gets a bit tighter in the coming episodes.

Also rewatched Tropic Thunder. It still holds up after all these years, I laughed out loud quite a few times. 

[Heartofice]

Watched Poor Things . Maybe it was just under the wrong circumstances as was with the other half but it wasn’t really all that enjoyable and was a bit disappointed.

On one hand I loved the aesthetic and the creativity and some of the humour, the performances. On the other hand it went out of its way to make me feel uncomfortable and a bit unpleasant. 
 

Just didn’t enjoy it all that much, which is really not what I was expecting.

[ljkeane]

I watched Dune 2 last night. It was very good. It’s a long time since I’ve been in a crowded cinema though. People are quite annoying.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 hour ago, Veltigar said:

Also rewatched Tropic Thunder. It still holds up after all these years, I laughed out loud quite a few times. 

It's kind of amazing how well it holds up considering how problematic it is. There's no way it would be made today.

Couldn't sleep so I watched Death Proof. I don't get why it's not more popular in the QT rankings. Sure it's dumb and cheesy, but that's the point and the stunts are insane. Zoe Bell is a goddess. 

[Isis]

On 3/7/2024 at 12:43 PM, Ran said:

Rewatched Die Hard, after listening to the Blank Check podcast with Kevin Smith as a guest discussing it. Really holds up in a lot of ways.

We started watching The Movies That Made Us on Netflix and I almost wasn't going to bother watching the one about Die Hard (because even though the movie is fine I'm not as obsessivley into it as so many people seem to be). Interesting though. I was not aware of the stuff about taking Bruce Willis off the film posters because people thought he was a joke. Not sure I fully agree that Die Hard invented action films though. Sure, for things like Speed (normal dude becomes a hero) I can see it. But all action films? 

Also finished up Freud. I just feel like this was too long at eight episodes. There seemed to be too much retreading of similar grounds. It had an interesting premise (hynosis!) and Freud himself was a well drawn character but it did drag towards the end even though there was still plenty of action happening.

 

[IlyaP]

Finally watching Star Trek: Deep Space 9, after hearing friends rave about it for years and years. It is pleasant so far. Only ten episodes in and oh lordy, Wallace Shawn is already Wallace Shawning about wonderfully! 

[Derfel Cadarn]

20 minutes ago, IlyaP said:

Finally watching Star Trek: Deep Space 9, after hearing friends rave about it for years and years. It is pleasant so far. Only ten episodes in and oh lordy, Wallace Shawn is already Wallace Shawning about wonderfully! 

Seasons 1 and 2 aren’t great (tho donhave some great episodes), but from season 3 it really ups its game.

[Ran]

Watched After Yang, a 2021 SF drama starring Colin Farrell. It's a sort of Black Mirrorish film, using its SFnal premise/setting (a utopic-seeming future after the end of a 60 year war with China, in which androids are used to act as siblings for newly-adopted children from China who can then teach them something of their Chinese culture and heritage) to tell a quiet story about memory, loss, and death. Yang is the titular android, played by Justin H. Min, and his sudden malfunction one day leads to  his family wrestling with what to do to fix him, which ultimately leads to discoveries about the secrets he had and about his past which reflected on those secrets. It was a pleasant, thoughtful film, with some really lovely production design imagining this post-war future where peace seems to have led to adopting Asian fashions, architectural styles, and cuisine. The theme for the film was composed by the late Ryuichi Sakamoto, who won the best score Academy Award for The Last Emperor... and who coincidentally scored a Black Mirror  episode (or maybe not coincidentally?). His last score was for Kore-eda's Monster which, funnily enough, I just started watching today.

Then I watched Charlie Kaufman's post-modern masterpiece, Synecdoche, New York, starring the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman. Never seen the film before, but it's a very Kaufman film, reminding me of his later films Anomalisa and I'm Thinking of Ending Things. Hoffman plays Caden Cotard, a theater director in a somewhat estranged marriage who ends getting a MacArthur Fellowship to create a great play... which ends up becoming the play-within-the-play, blurring reality as he stages, essentially, a grand examination of his life, and then the life of everyone he had contact with, until it's this all-consuming behemoth with an enormous cast playing all these people he knows (including, ultimately, actors playing himself, and actors playing actors playing himself). Hits all the Kaufman themes. Hoffman's performance is exceptional.

Then for a change of pace, I watched Road House, which I haven't seen in a couple of decades. Man, what a crazy film. Apparently, Keith David had way more to do in the film, but the first cut was 3.5 hours long (per the director, Rowdy Herrington) and David's bits were among those cut. It's a luridly, pure 80's film, and it's hard in some ways to really quantify why it's so mesmerizing. So, as usual, I'll link to Sean T. Collins' 365 short essays (one for every day of the year) on the film. Of course, Jake Gyllenhaal will play the part of Dalton in Doug Liman's remake of the film, with Connor McGregor, no less, playing the part of the bad guy's toughest hombre. Reviews are mixed, I've seen, and I suspect it will on the one hand make serious improvements on the fight choreography and cinematography of the original, but will lose some of the ineffable charm and sheer outrageousness of the original.

 

 

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

Don't Worry Darling

I don't know if it was out-sized expectations or BTS rumors, but mark this as another film that didn't deserve the drubbing it got from critics. It wasn't amazing but I thought it was pretty good. 

Great cast. Great performances. Beautiful cinematography. Flawless production values. Interesting premise, even if it was executed in a slightly underwhelming way. It held my attention all the way through. 

[Corvinus85]

I re-watched Highlander after many years. I forgot how ridiculously hilarious this movie can be. And I must have watched a different cut this time around, because I don't recall the WW2 scene. 

I'm sure the Henry Cavill remake is going to be less campy, but I hope there will still be some humor in it.

[Ran]

Finished Kore-Eda's film Monster. Spectacular film, and part way through I  was just amazed at how good Sakura Ando is (she was spectacular in Kore-Eda's Shoplifters) was and then as the story shifted perspective (there is a Rashomon-like aspect to the film, in which we gain new understanding and insights to the same events by revisiting them within different contexts, although it's not like Rashomon where the shift in context directly relates to how someone describe things) she fades into the background and I lamented it... except then it got better and better as it went.

The story starts in a very basic way, a single mother (Ando) has a young 5th-grader son who she fears is being bullied and abused by a teacher at the school. She enters a Kafkaesque nightmare of conflict-avoidant school bureaucracy, really powerfully portrayed on Ando's part, and things escalate until the teacher is fired.... And then we go back, and we see some of the real story, as understood by the teacher. Except... then we see more of the real story, and we realize that not everything was as it seems. 

In the end, the film hinges on how well Kore-eda directs this thing, and in particular his direction of the young boys, the son played by Soya Kurokawa and another boy in his class whose relation to Kurokawa's character is ambiguous at first, played by Hinata Hiiragi.

Spoiler

The ending, in which the two boys clamber out of the abandoned train after the tsunami ends, and then run down the abandoned tracks where the gate that once blocked away has vanished, led a lot of people to ask Kore-eda at Cannes if it meant the boys were in the afterlife. Kore-eda admitted it was not his intention, but rather that the gate was blown away by the tsunami, symbolizing that the boys had come to their own and would forge their own path. 

Really beautiful moment, the ending.

Also, should note this was the final film in which Ryuichi Sakamoto contributed original score. He was too ill to do a full score, but he provided two original piano pieces which are quite lovely, as well as some other work he had done previously. The film is dedicated to him, as he died before its release.

ETA: Just saw that Kore-eda won Best Director at the 17th Asian Film Awards for his work on this film, following his win last year for Broker (which I really want to see).

Edited March 11 by Ran

[mormont]

On 3/10/2024 at 10:10 AM, Heartofice said:

Watched Poor Things . Maybe it was just under the wrong circumstances as was with the other half but it wasn’t really all that enjoyable and was a bit disappointed.

On one hand I loved the aesthetic and the creativity and some of the humour, the performances. On the other hand it went out of its way to make me feel uncomfortable and a bit unpleasant.

Well, yeah. It's a film whose themes include the infantilisation of women in society, how that enables their exploitation, and whether humanity is bestial at heart. It clearly intends to make the viewer feel uncomfortable (so job done). If anything, the film can be (and has been) criticised for not going far enough in that respect.

I also watched it on Saturday and as a big fan of the original novel, felt it was a pretty good adaptation. I was slightly cautious going in because I knew it had dropped certain aspects of the original. But it's actually very strong. The steampunk aesthetic is an addition, but it serves the same role as Gray's illustrations in the novel, lending a sense of fantasy that's important to the tone. (The novel has an epilogue where Bella explains that the entire story of her being an infant brain transplanted into an adult body is an obvious fantasy of her imaginative and frivolous husband, who has read too much Gothic fiction). The setting is moved from Glasgow to London but that barely matters in the end.

Mark Ruffalo is amazing in this, as is Willem Dafoe, and obviously Emma Stone. It has some issues, but overall I'd recommend it to anyone.

[Heartofice]

5 minutes ago, mormont said:

It clearly intends to make the viewer feel uncomfortable (so job done).

Sure, I just think you need to be in the right mood to watch it. It’s purposefully grotesque and the music is ear splitting. It’s good, but I didn’t really enjoy it in the way I have his other movies.

[BigFatCoward]

Wife wants to watch American Fiction tonight, I'm always loath to watch Oscar worth films, they are so dull.  Is it any good?  I do quite like Wright.

Edited March 12 by BigFatCoward

[Ran]

It starts well, has some good skewerings of the publishing world throughout, but it also leans a lot on family drama which is well-written but nothing you haven't seen before. It's elevated by the performances.  
 

ETA: Also, last night Netflix released To Kill a Tiger, one of the Oscar-nominated documentaries. It covers the events following the gang-rape of a 13-year-old girl in a rural rice farming community in Jharkhand, a state in eastern India. Her father and mother determine to take it to the police, with the support of a women's organization named the Srijan Foundation that advocates the law being used to deal with these cases. The problem is that in these rural communities, the usual preference is to handle it internally, and of course the natural suggestion is that the girl is then married to one of her rapists. The family's refusal leads to incredible pressure, and it highlights the fact that their life is lived communally, and being shut out of the social life of the village also means losing out on the communal aid, which can make things incredibly difficult. 

We follow the case all the way to a conclusion, and I have to admire the young girl for her bravery (she personally reviewed the documentary and agreed to let them release it) and that of her family. The coda at the end shows that their determination seems to have had an effect in their native state, as more women and girls became willing to come forward cases to the courts.

Edited March 12 by Ran

[TheLastWolf]

Deadwood The Movie just done

Spoiler

Ou Father which art in heaven-

Let him fucking stay there

Dies gloriously he does Al fucking Swearengen

@polishgenius I'll settle for a 3 way tie with The Wire and Twin Peaks. 

It wouldn't have been a contest at all in the first place if the cocksuckers hadn't cancelled it. Pardon my french (proceeds to "Oh, I speak French"), lingering vestiges of a sumptuous sojourn at the frontier.

Edited March 13 by TheLastWolf