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Justified s1 finale – that was one ballsy episode.
Just about any other show would have kept Bo and Johnny alive, somehow keeping the various relationships with the other characters in some weird, contrived fashion. This one? Nope. No hesitation on pulling the trigger
Season 2 is definitely the best, bringing in Margo Martindale, Jeremy Davies, and Kaitlyn Dever.
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Watched “Motherless Brooklyn”, which is a 2019 noir detective movie set in the 50s starring and directed by Ed Norton, who is playing a detective with Tourette’s. It’s based on a Jonatham Lethem novel, too.
And it’s a good movie, solid in every respect. It didn’t blow me away – I think it lacks anything particularly special about it. The plot works fine, the characters are interesting in a noir kind of way, the mystery is solid… but you know the tropes, you know the steps the movie will go through, and there just isn’t anything that’ll shake things up in any way. It’s… fine.
The most interesting thing about it is probably that it revolves around a slightly fictionalised version of Robert Moses, who built New York City as we know it today, especially its parks, and who did so in an absolutely racist manner that forced black and poor people out of their neighboorhoods and did deliberately not give them access to those pretty parks that the white population got out of the deal. There’s a Behind the Bastards episode about this, so I knew it was a real thing, and it was nice seeing that picked up on in this form.
Oh, and it was also nice seeing Bruce Willis (probably for the last time), who plays Norton’s character’s mentor figure.
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Succession, season 4, episode 3.
That was amazing, and unexpected!
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Raylan Givens and Boyd Crowder, Classic Antagonists
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God I love those opening credits.
Here’s the full song:
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Succession, season 4, episode 3. That was amazing, and unexpected!
I keep seeing people saying that it was “amazing and unexpected”… but really??? I mean, considering the name of the show and everything else…
I thought it was actually a subpar episode, tbh. I’m glad they’re ending the show now because they’ve been re-treading a lot of ground, although now at least we’ll move forward somewhat to something “new”, so that’s good… but yeah.
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Re-watched the Watchmen movie with my kid, first time I saw it since it was in the theatres (and this time in the cut with the pirate anime thing). Its weaknesses and strengths are pretty much what I remembered. Overall, I still think it’s a great addition to see some of the moments in the book beautifully executed in movie form. As a movie in and of itself, well, it does have a lot of weaknesses, but it has to have been kind of mindblowing to see this if you didn’t know the book. One thing I hadn’t remembered is how bad Malin Ackerman was.
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I’ve been feeling pretty shitty and stressed out the past few weeks, so I treated myself to a two showing at the cinema today, which is actually the first time I’ve ever done that.
Super Mario Bros Movie
This was pretty fun. It goes from the same starting place the 80s Super Show did, of Mario and Luigi being Italian-American plumbers from Brooklyn, rather than the games’ “lore” of Mario being actually Italian, and I think that works for it. Pratt is perfectly decent as Mario (I think it actually suffers from trying to get him to do “let’s-a go” as a catchphrase, to be honest), Day is good as Luigi, Jack Black is excellent as Bowser, if you’d told me any one of half a dozen actresses was playing Peach rather than Anya-Taylor Joy, I’d have believed you, Rogen grew on me as DK while the worst bit of casting is actually Fred Armisen as Cranky Kong, which didn’t work for me at all.
Visually, it’s great except that some of the main characters feel just slightly ineffably wrong. Bowser’s got weird shoulders (or is it just weird that he had shoulders – I can’t tell), Peach has got a Dreamworks smirk nose, everyone’s eyes feel too big. Because they’re adapting such well known characters from a visually similar medium, those small differences just make them feel off-model rather than a legitimate artistic choice.
This definitely feels like a first film adaptation in terms of just how much is crammed in as easter eggs (in the same way Iron Man did a lot more of that stuff than most MCU films do now), everything from the GameCube start-up music to the Disk System mascot. Which is quite fun. It’s a film made for freeze-framing. It doesn’t have a huge amount of depth beyond that, but it doesn’t especially need it. I was surprised by how well it all hangs together, especially the Mario Kart stuff, which doesn’t feel as tacked on as I expected.
I’d watch another of these.
Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
I used to play D&D but it’s not something I know much about in terms of lore. This film does really well at making that not matter. It really presents itself as just a fantasy film, one that happens to mention some places names I recognised from the titles of computer games I’ve not played, rather than necessarily being A Dungeons And Dragons Adaptation.
The cast is really good, the story is fun, with bits that can be interpreted as meta-commentary on a D&D campaign (I saw someone describe Rege-Jean Page’s Zenk as “the DM’s favourite NPC”, which is absolutely spot on; there’s also a great moment of an intricately constructed puzzle that the party end up ruining and fudging their way around, which I’m sure most DMs can relate to), the action’s good and the world-building isn’t too OTT, which I suspect is a hard thing to resist when doing a D&D adaptation. Plus, while I may not be a “proper” D&D nerd, there is some lovely fan-service with the kids from the D&D cartoon showing up as another group of adventurers in the tournament thing at the end that I loved.
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Netflix’s Titans had an OK first series, with it wrapping it up well in the opener for series 2. After that though, it quickly devolves into a mess.
Its principle problem is a plot that relies on everyone being suspicious of everyone and lots of “you got X killed” rubbish. As, you know, there’s a known, actual killer but the series allows them to resort to the “if you hadn’t done X, I wouldn’t had to kill” bullcrap too often.
It’s still got a handful of eps left, maybe it’ll recover.
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Watched an episode of The Great American Joke-Off, which is basically Mock the Week without all of the topical stuff (I think it was filmed last year). It even ends with the exact same one-liner prompt-off, with the same buzzer effect.
They went so far as to fly over a bunch of the MtW regulars to be on it; the episode I watched had Ed Gamble, Rhys James, and Milton Jones.
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Nobody
This was surprising, in a good way. The pitch doesn’t inspire confidence – guy gets robbed, is looked down by his wife and family, beats up and kills many people to get them back. Yeah, that sounds macho crap of the worst order.
On the other hand, there’s a John Wick influence and link here, so maybe it’ll surprise. And it does.
The main reason it does is Odenkirk, whose portrait of Hutch, in both versions, is excellent. Hutch, as someone out to escape his slaughter-filled past, is a guy trying to not draw attention, he is trying to be nobody. When he returns to the man he was, he is this calmly demonically effective killer.
Add in great support from both Christopher Lloyd, as his dad, and RZA as his brother, and the result is a fun, crazy 90 minutes, with a ludicrously high body count.
The final confrontation is particularly epic and bonkers, but it’s not the only one. The sequence where the Russian mob send a pair of assassins after Hutch’s Dad, only for Lloyd to shotgun them both, is a delight.
Good dumb fun.
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Christopher Lloyd has been very visible recently. He’s working a lot for somebody who’s in his mid-eighties.
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He’s both brilliant and hilarious in Nobody.
It’s how he does this whole thing:
“You know, son”, shoots guy with shotgun, “I’ve missed this.”
And the look on his face as he does it is perfect.
Meanwhile, while it had a very bumpy road to it, Titans had a good second series finale. It was only marred by killing off a character.
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Christopher Lloyd has been very visible recently. He’s working a lot for somebody who’s in his mid-eighties.
He’s like someone in his mid-eighties who’s travelled back to his mid-fifties.
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It’s funny, isn’t it, how long Christopher Lloyd has been an old man in my mind, just because he had that crazy white hair in Back to the Future. When he first played Doc Brown, Lloyd was actually in his mid-forties – younger than I am now -, but in my soul, he just stopped aging in the eighties.
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I think some actors get that with parts that are aged up. I was amazed the other day that Topol had just died, I imagined he had decades ago as his famous part was an old man in a film that came out before I was born. He was in his mid 30s playing that part and they greyed up his hair and beard.
There’s a couple of British sitcom actors like that too with Clive Dunne and Richard Wilson playing old men when they weren’t particularly very old.
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I think also people generally tend to look younger these days. It’s like with Dennis the Menace’s dad. When I was a kid, he was balding and dressed like Python’s cranky old men (save the hanky on the head). He looked geriatric. These days, that character, unchanged, is the granddad and Dennis’s dad just looks like Dennis with a slightly receding hairline.
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It’s like with Dennis the Menace’s dad. When I was a kid, he was balding and dressed like Python’s cranky old men
I believe you’re mixing Dennis’ dad with his neighbor, the crotchety old Mr. Wilson. In the comic strip, the B&W television show, and the 1993 film, Dennis’ father was a skinny young man with black hair and glasses.
Wrong Dennis The Menace.
Beano Dennis The Menace was at some point retconned so that his original dad became his grandad, making his dad the original Dennis.
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Oh, he did have the knotted hanky!
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A lot of the “looking older” from years past comes down to the styles and fashions of the times versus a current perspective. We are looking at what was considered contemporary back then with modern eyes and sensibilities.
There is a strong element of that. I think there are things like balding people now will just shave it all off rather than try some comb over attempt.
Stan Lee is a good example, if you look at pictures of him in 1962 he looks older than he does in 1982. He’s wearing a suit, got a receding hairline, some ‘hair work’ and a t-shirt and jeans later the 60 year old version looks as young as the 40 year old. I never saw my dad in his 40s in anything other than formal trousers and shirt, I’m typing this in a pair of cargo shorts and a Spinal Tap t-shirt aged 50.
I think there are other elements with a bigger focus on health and beauty, going to the gym and using things like moisturisers. The latter I think vey underestimated, south east Asians are often hard to age because I think the high humidity does that naturally.
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I watched Nope tonight. I liked it parts of it quite a bit, but it felt like it was ultimately fairly underwritten and failed to come together in a really satisfying way in the end. One of those movies that somehow ends up less than the sum of its parts. But I’m still glad I watched it.
I also watched M3GAN this weekend with my daughter and thought it was fun. It’s nothing revolutionary and it all plays out quite predictably, but it’s a nice tight little light horror yarn that’s pitched just about right for a young teen, with some fun ideas and straightforward execution.
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Christel and I took her nephew to see The Super Mario Bros. Movie today. He loved it. I thought it was fine. I have a very rudimentary knowledge of the various Mario games so I picked up a few of the Easter eggs but most went over my head. I don’t play the games so there is so much I don’t know. (I did play Donkey Kong when it was an arcade game though it was never one of my favorites.) I think the movie did a decent enough job telling a story that doesn’t require intimate knowledge of the games. It’s not a movie I would have seen if I had to pick and will probably never watch it again, but it was an enjoyable and entertaining way to spend an afternoon.
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Controversial take but I like Apocalypse Now more than Godfather I and II.
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Controversial take but I like Apocalypse Now more than Godfather I and II.
I can appreciate that view and I may even agree with it. I would need to rewatch all of them as it’s been several years since I have seen them.
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Apocalypse Now is just a little more perfect in my opinion. They’re all masterpieces of course.
Parts of it aren’t very realistic, it’s a almost like a Greek myth with over the top characters, especially Kurtz. (And the long version is better I think it was released as Apocalypse Now: Redux.
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Colin From Accounts showed up on iplayer and I quite enjoyed it: an Australian romcom sitcom that manages to be sweet and funny without being too cosy and saccharine and sentimental.
It’s only eight half-hour episodes, so quite a quick watch, but I ended up wishing there was more.
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Apocalypse Now is just a little more perfect in my opinion. They’re all masterpieces of course.
Parts of it aren’t very realistic, it’s a almost like a Greek myth with over the top characters, especially Kurtz. (And the long version is better I think it was released as Apocalypse Now: Redux.
Apocalypse Now is basically a retelling of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
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Which is a great read, by the way. There’s another movie version of Heart of Darkness with Tim Roth and with John Malkovich as Kurtz that’s worth watching – it’s not as great as Apocalypse Now, of course, but it follows the novel closely, and it’s an interesting foil to compare to Apocalypse Now.
Trigger Warning – 90s trailer:
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I am rewatching Godfather II and I stilll think Apocalypse Now is better even though Al Pacino is just absolutely godly in that role. Hottest, most electrifying on screen male persona in cinematic history maybe.
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Tonight I watched the first two episodes of Citadel, the new Amazon spy thriller series.
Like other Amazon shows it looks pretty good and obviously cost a lot to make. But also like other Amazon shows the story isn’t quite there, not yet at least.
It’s all very based on the Bond/Bourne/Mission Impossible model, with secret spy and villain organisations gunning for each other and suave spies with amnesia trying to remember who they are, but it doesn’t really have its own identity and so ends up feeling like a load of genre clichés all mixed up together.
Stanley Tucci adds some charm and is probably the most likeable thing in it, but based on these first two episodes I feel like I can take it or leave it at this point.
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Like other Amazon shows it looks pretty good and obviously cost a lot to make.
$300 Million for six fairly short episodes!
They overrun so much that they had to pay the cast their full salaries again for reshoots.
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What I’m finding with a lot of the spy shows now is that everyone is an arse. What made Bourne work was that he wasn’t so easy for the audience to latch on to.
Talking of fun stuff, Operation Fortune is a fun caper / adventure tale from Guy Ritchie, but he made the mistake of casting Hugh Grant, who pretty much steals the entire movie!
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Huh, the Dungeons & Dragons movie was surprisingly fun… Just a nice self-contained fantasy adventure with a lot of really neat visual tricks… and yes, great use of the Portal gun/stick in a movie… I bet Valve ain’t too happy about that shit =P
IIRC the movie flopped quite badly… it’s a shame because it’s actually pretty good, but honestly I’m not sure that was a good starting point for a franchise anywyas, it really works well as a self-contained story, no need for a sequel, so there’s that… though I suppose the studio ain’t too happy about that one.
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Watching s3 of Daredevil.
I like the origin story of Bullseye and his fights with DD.
But… how much punishment can DD take? So many cuts, bruises, and near death fights.
Like Bruce Wayne: Takes a licking and keeps on ticking 🤣Donofrio as Kingpin in those all white suits is surreal. Like he just jumped out of the comics. Perfect cosplay.
Netflix did the DD far more justice than the DD snippets we saw on She-Hulk.
The streaming rights are back in the MCU, and give them credit for salvaging Cox and D’onofrio, but I want DD to be badass in the MCU.I said before when Netflix didn’t go through with Grendel that Netflix wouldn’t have done it justice.
I have to take that back if they were into it like they were into DD and not the Jupiter season. -
I went to see Suzume, Makoto Shinkai’s latest movie last weekend and had a real good time with it. The titular character is a 17-year old schoolgirl living on Kyushu who encounters Souta, a handsome young man seeking out abandoned areas with doors. Turns out Souta is a closer, a line of mystics who travel the country closing these doors to prevent an ethereal worm entity from coming through them and causing earthquakes and other disasters. After helping him close the door near her home town, the pair encounter a talking cat who turns Souta into a walking, talking chair, and they set off together in chase of the cat while sealing more doors as they cross Japan together.
I’ll admit I’ve not kept up with Shinkai’s work for a good while. My local cinema actually showed a couple more movies of his in the lead-in to Suzume’s release and I managed to miss them all but I’m very glad I made it to this. Shinkai’s idiom is all about human connection and relationships but while his earliest works like The Place Promised in Our Early Days and Voices of a Distant Star are about the void of loneliness, being separated from the people you love, Suzume is about the forging of bonds and the strength of friendship and community. Everywhere Suzume and Souta go, they find new friends and people willing to help them out – though Suzume never tells them exactly why she’s going places and needs somewhere to sleep.
It’s also an incredibly sapphic film in the first half with Suzume storming off or angrily hanging up the phone from her aunt/guardian whenever it’s suggested she’s hanging out with boys, and she has a conversation with the first person who helps her out about boyfriends being awful though this fades as Suzume and Souta’s relationship inevitably moves towards romance – apparently Shinkai planned for Souta’s character to be female because he was growing bored with heterosexual relationships in his movies but a producer convinced him the fans would prefer it, and clearly that producer should be fired. That said their relationship does feel natural and they play off each other very well, it’s not quite screwball comedy levels of people going from fighting to liking each other but it’s a similar arc throughout the movie. I spent a lot of time smiling at how they play off each other.
And as is usually the case for big-name anime releases this movie is gorgeous with a beautiful colour palette, the CGI integration is very well done and the animation is exceptionally well-done. The way Souta moves as a chair is amazing, especially as he gets used to his new body and becomes more agile and graceful. There’s some exceptional visual storytelling throughout the movie and that’s a fine example of it.
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Huh, the Dungeons & Dragons movie was surprisingly fun… Just a nice self-contained fantasy adventure with a lot of really neat visual tricks… and yes, great use of the Portal gun/stick in a movie… I bet Valve ain’t too happy about that shit =P
IIRC the movie flopped quite badly… it’s a shame because it’s actually pretty good, but honestly I’m not sure that was a good starting point for a franchise anywyas, it really works well as a self-contained story, no need for a sequel, so there’s that… though I suppose the studio ain’t too happy about that one.
I took the kids to see this earlier in the week and I agree it was enjoyable. Surprisingly so
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I watched The Menu last week, which was a really fun little movie. I’d say it’s an example of a grotesque comedy – a genre we really don’t get enough of. Fiennes is fantastic, as he always is really, and the whole movie revolves around his core. A really good idea, executed very well. Good times.
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Also started on The Nevers, out of simple curiosity. The first episode was actually very good and instantly drew me in. There’s a lot of Whedonisms in there, but in a good way as far as I am concerned. Good cast, nice steam-punky ideas, interesting characters, as usually neat dialogue… and the story was very interesting. There’s two different factions of villains, one who are kidnapping the Touched, and one group of terrorists led by a Touched who has gone insane (or actually rather who was already insane when the event happened), and she’s got some great insane villain dialogue (something that Whedon’s pretty good at).
It’s a shame this had to fall apart because Whedon turned out to be an asshole. It’ll be interesting to see how the rest of the season goes – the second episode is fine, but we’ll see what happens once the production became more troubled. But I guess even if it had been the perfect TV series, a show about women kicking ass and battling condescending men made by a man who abused quite a few women in one way or the other was never going to continue into another season.
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Over the past week I’ve watched Dead Ringers on Amazon Prime.
As a whole it’s not perfect, but the good outweighs the bad – Rachel Weisz is excellent in dual leading roles as twin doctors, there are plenty of effective unsettling/dramatic/funny moments throughout, and even though it’s fairly gory in places it doesn’t feel gratuitous.
It doesn’t quite tie everything together in the end – for a six-episode series, it maybe bites off more than it can chew in terms of story – and it pushes towards slightly silly territory in places. But overall I still enjoyed it and I’m a bit surprised it’s had such a low profile.
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Beef on Netflix is a really good watch, and the best series I’ve seen on there in a long time. What starts as a fairly light comedy-drama spinning out of a road rage incident ends up becoming something much more multi-layered, thoughtful and strange by the end, with some great plotting along the way and excellent performances by Ali Wong and Steven Yeun as the two leads. Well worth a look.
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The only post-Marvel work by the Russo brothers that has succeeded for me has been Extraction – and probably its sequel. Citadel isn’t going to change the picture either.
It’s been five episodes of OK camera work, a bunch of bastards you’re supposed to back because of some worse bastards over there and it’s all draped in this brown filter.
Also, like the Picard series, all the office environments look like dimly lit hellholes. No wonder everyone goes off the rails working in these pits.
Meanwhile Netflix deploys The Mother which is a rather confused film. It starts off as an action vehicle for Lopez, then it morphs into a weird, tough love military parenting thing, before pivoting back to a final fight with Joseph Fiennes bad guy. It’s OK but not really the film you’d expect from its trailer.
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Citadel isn’t going to change the picture either. It’s been five episodes of OK camera work, a bunch of bastards you’re supposed to back because of some worse bastards over there and it’s all draped in this brown filter.
I haven’t watched this week’s episode yet, and to be honest I might not ever get to it as the rest of it has been fairly mediocre.
Tucci is the one bright light among a bored-looking cast that seems stuck between pouting and trying to look cool while going through every spy cliché in the book.
And then you get these occasional scenes and subplots that seem to be begging us to actually care about and invest in what is otherwise an incredibly shallow, surface-level show.
I gather this was a fairly messy production, and it shows in the final product as it ultimately just doesn’t seem sure what kind of show it wants to be. Other than ‘not a very good one’.
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It’s a shame this had to fall apart because Whedon turned out to be an asshole. It’ll be interesting to see how the rest of the season goes – the second episode is fine, but we’ll see what happens once the production became more troubled. But I guess even if it had been the perfect TV series, a show about women kicking ass and battling condescending men made by a man who abused quite a few women in one way or the other was never going to continue into another season.
The Nevers actually wrapped up pretty well. The plot of the season felt pretty rushed from like the third episode or so, presumably because they realised they had to finish the whole story in just that one season, and because of that there was quite a bit of stuff that really doesn’t go anywhere – but nevertheless, they did manage to finish it all pretty well. It was a really good show overall, I thought, and I’d have happily watched another few seasons of the story being developed more slowly.
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Yep, the Grey Man had a fantastic cast that the story did nothing good with. It was…. grey.
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Yeah, agreed. The Grey Man could’ve been good, but it was just a thoroughly average movie.
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I watched and very much enjoyed the first episode of Fubar
Yes, it’s cheesy in places and pretty rough round the edges but it’s good fun, some decent humour and banter and there’s tremendous chemistry between Arnie and his daughter and also with his ‘sidekick’ Barry and the rest of their team.
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Accidentally came upon a recent MAX miniseries, Love & Death, starring Elizabeth Olsen and Jesse Plemons along with supporting roles from Krysten Ritter, Elizabeth Marvel and Patrick Fugit. With strong performances from the cast, excellent writing by David E. Kelley and and near-flawless directing by Lesli Linka Glatter, this (so far) is one of the best things I’ve seen from HBO in a long time. I watched the first two (of seven) episodes, and I’m hooked.
This is based on an actual event that occurred in Texas in 1980, but I don’t recall those headlines and so I have no clue which way this story will end. I’m just enjoying the ride!
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Mobile Suit Gundam: Cucruz Doan’s Island
This is an odd one. The original Cucruz Doan’s island is episode 15 of the 1979 Gundam TV series, which is seen as a low point of the show due to subpar animation (and given the animation on the rest of the show, that’s saying something). It’s never been shown in the west and is frequently left out of repeats in Japan. Yoshikazu Yashihiko, the original character designer and art director on the show even omitted the story from the Gundam the Origin manga which retold the show’s story and he later adapted parts of to animation. So this movie is directed by Yas with a similar design and feel to his Gundam the Origin anime even though the segments of the manga adapting the actual show have never been done… weirdness all around.
Anyway, the plot of the movie sees a team from the White Base sent to investigate an island in the Pacific which may be home to a Zeon remnant left behind to wreak havoc as they retreat. The team encounters a Zaku and Amuro and the Gundam take a fall off a cliff during the battle, with everyone else retreating back to the ship with the intention of rescuing him later. Amuro later wakes up in a house on the island full of kids and the titular Cucruz Doan, a Zeon soldier who seems to have defected, having flashbacks to killing civilians during a battle in a city. Amuro begins to fit in on the island, helping out while also trying to find where the Gundam has gone down. Elsewhere a Federation fleet is approaching Gibraltar and M’Quve threatens to devastate six cities if they come any closer, and before a rescue mission can be sent Bright receives orders to join General Revill’s forces in Belfast immediately, and so time is running out for them to find and rescue their comrade.
I’ll admit as much as I like Gundam overall I’ve only watched a few episodes of the original TV show, the animation is so stilted and dated it’s hard to watch at times and while the movie adaptations are ropey, their new animation is a vast improvement. So I’ve never seen the episode this is based on and I’m quite curious now to see what it’s like. This version of the story takes place later – between episodes 25 and 26 – and based on that it’s clear that M’Quve’s subplot which becomes increasingly crucial as the story progresses is new material at the very least. The plot moves at a decent pace and it rarely feels like a half-hour story stretched out to almost 2 hours, but it still feels like part of the grander Gundam story, having stuff like General Revil discuss having the White Base assigned to his forces gives a sense of the war’s progress and adds context to the White Base’s orders. And like, even though there’s a lot of kids in this movie they’re not particularly annoying.
It’s also a beautiful movie to watch, the second big name anime I’ve watched in the last few weeks with a lovely colour palette, there’s these beautiful almost psychedelic colours at a couple of points, really interesting lighting, even a couple of points where they do that freeze frame on a painted scene thing that anime used to do for moments of drama – though it’s done for laughs here. The action is spectacular as well, there are only a handful of battles but each one is unique and moves the plot forward. The introduction of the Zeon special forces team that are the main antagonists is especially impressive.
Ultimately while I really enjoyed this, I’m not sure of how much appeal it’ll have to someone who’s not into Gundam. It’s a decent story that’s very well-executed, but it’s not entirely accessible, being a story in the middle of a bigger story. But like, it’s also a hell of a lot more accessible than NT or Hathaway so maybe give it a shot if you want some mecha action?
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Evil has a weird mix of humour and horror. Sometimes it feels like this show shouldn’t work at all, but somehow it does. A lot of it has to do with the writing just being pretty good – even the stuff that’s completely over the top, like grandma not believing her daughter that this man has been threatening her (and Kristen never properly explaining what’s happened) kind of works because the dialogues work. But yeah, those bits are kind of stretching it, but it all hangs together pretty well and it’s very entertaining. I’m considering whether to buy the second season, the first one was on amazon prime but I’d have to pay for the next one.
Oh, and I don’t think Succession is for me. I understand why everybody is raving about it, it is very clearly an extremely good, sharp show, but… I just can’t watch everybody being a dick all the time like this, it’s exhausting.
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I’ve been watching Sweet Tooth with the family. It continues to take a little more of an ‘all ages’ take compared to the Vertigo comic but I think they make that work. I’m still enjoying it a lot and happy that for a change with a Netflix show they have confirmed a concluding 3rd season, which will be roughly around where the comic ended storywise and no annoying cliffhanger cancellation.
(Still pissed off about Lockwood and Co). It’s surprising how hard it is to find material that’s good to watch together from age 8 to 80 on streaming platforms. There’s acres of content aimed at kids or adults but not that much that works for all which used to be pretty much all TV aired before 9pm in the UK and most network stuff in the US.
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Thanks for the heads up on Love & Death. Watched all 7 episodes and really enjoyed it.
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Succession delivered a decent finale that played out this season’s storyline nicely. Really the whole of the last few episodes have felt like one big finale for the show.
Although weirdly it also feels like this episode easily could have been just a season finale, with more story to come in future years.
Either way, they left the show nicely by ending it here.
Special mention to Kieran Culkin who has been especially good this season and who has had some very moving moments over the past few weeks.
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We watched the first few episodes of Poker Face as it just hit NowTV.
It’s a fun episodic mystery TV series that feels like a conscious throwback to 1970s detective shows (there’s more than a hint of Columbo). Natasha Lyonne is really watchable as the lead whose gimmick is that she can always tell when someone’s lying, and there have been some fun guest-appearances so far too.
It’s fairly light and disposable murder-mystery stuff, but as a fan of that kind of thing I’m really quite enjoying it.
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Evil has a weird mix of humour and horror. Sometimes it feels like this show shouldn’t work at all, but somehow it does. A lot of it has to do with the writing just being pretty good – even the stuff that’s completely over the top, like grandma not believing her daughter that this man has been threatening her (and Kristen never properly explaining what’s happened) kind of works because the dialogues work. But yeah, those bits are kind of stretching it, but it all hangs together pretty well and it’s very entertaining. I’m considering whether to buy the second season, the first one was on amazon prime but I’d have to pay for the next one.
Oh, and I don’t think Succession is for me. I understand why everybody is raving about it, it is very clearly an extremely good, sharp show, but… I just can’t watch everybody being a dick all the time like this, it’s exhausting.
I found Evil season 2 a let down after season 1 being one of the best things on TV. It still had some good stuff in the stand-alone plots, but the season arcs just got too ridiculous for me. Still enjoyed it on balance, but I would have been pissed off if I had paid for it
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Evil after season 1 is a disappointment. They make such a point of making the team really smart and that talk to each other. Then, in season 2 they stop talking to eachother and start doing stupid things to make the plot work.
But, it’s still a lot of fun but they need to start wrapping it up. -
Christel and I really enjoyed Poker Face. It’s really just a fun and enjoyable series. It’s throwback nature is a real plus.
Just finished this first season. I really enjoyed its brand of old fashioned escapism – just quality writing and performances, with some inventive plots and with each episode a satisfying self-contained experience. Natasha Lyonne is so likeable too. The whole thing just works.
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I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson Season 3
Six more quarter-hours of Tim’s demented brilliance. He is still funny and warped.
I think this may be the perfect sketch comedy series ever. Each episode is about a quarter of an hour and each season is only six episodes. There is absolutely no fat to be found. Every sketch lasts just as long as it needs to and yet is just the right amount of time. The sketches themselves are just brilliantly written. As I told a coworker, I would describe them as “surreal cringe”.
The current season is great.
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Debenham’s was a major department store in the UK that expanded into Ireland in the early 2000s the way many British store chains did – by buying an existing Irish one and rebranding it. As the COVID lockdowns hit, they were one of the last shops to voluntarily close up… and less than a week later they announced they were shutting down their Irish operations, without even paying the 1,500 workers their agreed-upon redundancy. Realising quickly that the only bargaining chip they had was the stock still sitting in the stores, they set up picket lines outside all 11 branches in Ireland, preventing multiple attempts by shipping companies to remove anything from the shops. This would go on to be the longest industrial action in the history of the nation, lasting over a year until a combination of underhanded tactics and court-approved police action got the liquidator access to nine of the stores, leaving the workers little choice but to accept the third attempt at a negotiated settlement, insulting as it was. The documentary 406 Days is their story.
The broad events of the action are well-enough known or researchable – they’re even on Wikipedia – that it’s not ruining the story to write up a paragraph on them here. This film is a warning rather than a story of triumph. What happened to these workers could happen to any one of us, but it’s also an insight into worker solidarity, the power that we as individuals have, and how a small number of motivated people can cause an outsized effect on the country. It’s by turns uplifting and enraging and I highly recommend it.
Visually it’s primarily interviews with the workers in and around the stores they worked in, as well as a few with politicians and activists who supported them combined with archive footage from news reports and social media. But they got access to the Dublin City Centre store, which is still unoccupied 2 years later, and there’s some striking footage which seems to have been taken with a drone in the largely empty space. It feels almost apocalyptic, with a handful of display pieces – mostly wall mounted that weren’t removed and a bank of escalators breaking up a massively open space. I walk by it at least once a week and it’s weird to think of that much open space sitting unused in the middle of a vibrant city.
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Watched Avatar 2 tonight. Amazing visual artistry with some of the best effects I’ve ever seen, and for a long film they keep to a really high standard of CGI throughout.
But it’s all in service of such a nothingy story. Even moreso than the first movie, there’s barely any plot spread across these three hours, and nothing to really make you care about the characters.
At best it’s an impressive technical showcase, but even that gets dull after a while.
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I think this may be the perfect sketch comedy series ever. Each episode is about a quarter of an hour and each season is only six episodes. There is absolutely no fat to be found. Every sketch lasts just as long as it needs to and yet is just the right amount of time. The sketches themselves are just brilliantly written. As I told a coworker, I would describe them as “surreal cringe”.
That’s pretty much it, yeah.
I love “I Think You Should Leave”. I feel like I don’t really understand what it’s doing and I couldn’t even tell you if it’s good, as such, I just know that I can’t stop watching.
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We’ve been watching SILO, yet another “future dystopia” drama currently running on Apple+. What sets this one apart is the amazing cast starting with Rebecca Ferguson, Common and Tim Robbins, with terrific support from Rashida Jones, David Oyelowo, Will Patton, Iain Glen, Geraldine Page and others whose talents raise the material above the standard. 7 episodes are currently available, with 3 more in the first season arriving over the next three Fridays. I recommend it.
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I’ve been meaning to check it out, I really enjoyed the novel it’s based on… And should get around to reading the other two books in the series at some point…
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I found Evil season 2 a let down after season 1 being one of the best things on TV. It still had some good stuff in the stand-alone plots, but the season arcs just got too ridiculous for me. Still enjoyed it on balance, but I would have been pissed off if I had paid for it
Yeah, it’s still alright to watch, but it’s all over the place. There’s a lot of really batshit stuff happening, a lot of which doesn’t seem to have any consequences at least for the moment.
I kinda wish the overall series had just taken more time to develop its characters and plot before going all out in quite a few different ways so soon.2 users thanked author for this post.
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Extraction 2
Er, yeah, this all right but blighted by some terrible creative decisions. Chief among them is a really stupid kid. And sure, kids do dumb stuff but there’s a big gap between that and what happens here.
There’s a weirdness to the action too. Everyone is far too bullet resistant, scratch that, too resistant generally – it’s like watching a Terminator vs Terminator fight.
The other problem is Hollywood action movies aren’t really suited to dealing with hefty subjects like the death of a child and the impact on their parents.
Things it got right? Idris has a good cameo, the action is good and Rake can’t shake off being nearly dead.
There is something weird with the Netflix created material I’ve seen for the last few months. They get major actors, allocate big budgets but they don’t seem to see writing as also needing it. And that’s where it’s falling down for me. What’s that, a writer’s strike? Huh, now why could that be?
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Four films, triple figure body count, one man.
John Wick
This remains a near perfect action film. It has an excellent set-up, absurdly ambitous and well-executed action sequences. Add some smart casting and pacing and it is superb.
John Wick 2-4
This unofficial trilogy of a sequel story is good but they do also make a case for why there shouldn’t have been one. The trio work far better when seen in close proximity to each other, than each one with two years apart.
It is fair to say the whole High Table concept is hinted in the first film, more than can be picked up in a first viewing. But it is also the biggest problem in the trilogy. That problem being that, for all its talk of rules, the High Table refuses to apply them to its own, thus they render them worthless. Am I to buy Santini was the first to find a loophole to get away with killing his sister via a third party? No one has done that before? No way.
It gets worse in part three – where, at the very least, the Adjucator should have been killed and her head posted to the High Table. You want get medieval? This is what happens.
And then part four is massively blighted by the new villain, Vincent. This walking charisma void, a total waste of DNA, is a weak, pathetically indulged psychopathic crapbag. He attempts to weasel out of everything. His appearance is a millstone on the film, killing the pace dead. His final end? Nowhere near satisfying enough. And the Harbinger should have been killed as well.
The High Table? Fuck tha’ High Table.
Oh, and Lance Reddick got done dirty in four. He has three excellent appearances but got severly screwed over in four.
The other weaknesa in four is running a couple of sequences too long and not killing off characters when they should, like the indulgence granted to Vincent’s head minion.
But despite these weaknesses, the trio are, like their predecessor, superbly good looking films. They have excellent cinematography. The imagery is always very, very good. And this carries the set no matter what.
Add in those amazing action sequences – the sequence towards the end with the camera overhead, with Wick going room to room – and you will be forgiving to it, as you lose count of the body count again and again. It is hugely entertaining carnage.
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I’ve started rewatching all of Blackadder lately. This was spurred by Gold having a special recently about the “lost” pilot. Which wasn’t really lost, it just wasn’t made for broadcast and no-one’s bothered to show it before now.
It turns out the pilot was largely recycled into an episode of The Black Adder (the one where the Scotsman has letters that Edmund thinks proves his brother is a bastard). The key changes are the royal family being different (Fred Elliot off Coronation St as a pseudo-Henry VIII, his queen looking like Elizabeth I and Robert Bathurst off Toast of London as the other prince) and Blackadder himself being much more like he is in s2. Oh and someone else is playing Baldrick.
Apparently, after making the pilot, they decided to make Edmund the stupid one and Baldrick smart and then when Ben Elton came in for s2 he said it should be the other way around, not knowing that’s how it was in the pilot. Weird.
I have to say, I was a little surprised Gold actually showed it in its entirety uninterrupted. Often with documentaries about archive finds etc the viewer only gets to see it interrupted by talking heads or see them watching it. There was a screening set up for comedy types to see the pilot but wisely their reaction was kept for after the whole thing. A little odd that no-one mentioned that it was 75% the same as a broadcast episode but I guess that’s because no-one chooses to remember s1.
I could have sworn I’d seen all of it before but I remembered barely of it. So either I hadn’t seen most of it previously or, given how rubbish it is, I’d blanked it.
Given that, it’s incredible how much better Blackadder II is. It just works properly and smoothly on every level. The only duff bit is the weird mass murder twist tacked onto the end of the final episode. Strange that it was included like that rather than properly incorporated into the episode’s plot.
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I’m a rare contrarian with Blackadder (not for effect, I fully believe it). I like the first series best.
It is a comedy taste thing more than anything but I find the absurdity funnier than the witticism stuff later. It’s why I like very few US live action sitcoms as they are all based around one-liners but like the animated ones which are more into surrealism. The Blessed and Cook stuff in Blackadder 1 gives me belly laughs, the ‘cunning plan’ stuff in the next 3 raises a smile.
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Rewatched the first season of The Bear before I start the second. It really is a perfect little season of tv.
I’ve also been chipping away at Manifest. Each episode kind of bleeds into the next so it’s a nice show to just have playing in the background. The central mystery of a plane disappearing then reappearing five years later is fun. But the story has gotten a bit religious as it’s went on, so I’m hoping it doesn’t try and convert me by the time the finale rolls around.
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I’m a rare contrarian with Blackadder (not for effect, I fully believe it). I like the first series best.
I completely agree, though I couldn’t have articulated the reasons as well as you did.
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Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is another standard Transformers movie. The good guys (The Autobots and Maximals) and the bad guys (The Terrorcons) are in a chase to find an ancient Cybertronian artifact (The Transwarp key) so they can get home/summon Unicron to Earth. Two humans: former soldier Noah Diaz and museum intern Elena Wallace get caught up in the action and help the Autobots in their quest. And unlike the Michael Bay movies which frequently had the same general plot, this one’s a lot of fun.
So what’s the difference? This movie basically removes Bay’s worst excesses – there’s no misanthropy, no fetishisation of the military, the character designs are distinct and the action is largely comprehensible. The cast is big enough that most characters only get a little to do – Noah is the most prominent human, with Mirage and Airazor getting most time on the robot side. Pretty much everyone gets a moment or two to shine though. Mirage is especially fun to watch, he and Noah have a charming relationship and Pete Davidson’s performance is amusing and fits his goofball personality well.
The core plot is utter bollocks and the movie assumes a certain level of familiarity with the setting and concept of the Transformers and as a result the first act is a bit awkward and it seems a few moments that would have helped flesh out the characters and their motivations were excised – there’s a bit in the trailer where Elena says “this can’t be happening”, only to look up at Arcee who waves and Elena says “it’s happening” – which would have helped sell her movie from wanting to get away from the devastation to joining Noah and the Autobots… but these are minor things. Once the plot picks up it moves at a fair pace, there’s some big action setpieces and it’s ultimately a satisfying, if shallow movie. The kind of thing that would be a perfect mid-tier action flick if Hollywood still made them.
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Yesterday was Canada Day, and certain channels will pick certain marathons to run all weekend (and repeat over and over).
I have no problem keeping this shit on in the background, kinda sometimes, sorta depends.Showcase is doing Star Wars (and I thank fuck for a break from the MCU, yet never turn away from Winter Soldier).
When you keep this on in the background, and the commercials come on, some for their own SW marathon…
Well, Ewan McGregor loudly whining “You were the chosen one!” has me making sure I will avoid episodes 1-3.
I tried, but it is so easy to hate those movies.Also, Rogue One draws my attention every time, as does The Empire Strikes Back.
Luke and Vader’s lightsabre duel is just goddamned awesome. That sound puts me back in the theatre (remember lining up back in 1980?)2 users thanked author for this post.
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Yesterday was Canada Day, and certain channels will pick certain marathons to run all weekend (and repeat over and over).
I have no problem keeping this shit on in the background, kinda sometimes, sorta depends.Showcase is doing Star Wars (and I thank fuck for a break from the MCU, yet never turn away from Winter Soldier).
When you keep this on in the background, and the commercials come on, some for their own SW marathon…
Well, Ewan McGregor loudly whining “You were the chosen one!” has me making sure I will avoid episodes 1-3.
I tried, but it is so easy to hate those movies.Also, Rogue One draws my attention every time, as does The Empire Strikes Back.
Luke and Vader’s lightsabre duel is just goddamned awesome. That sound puts me back in the theatre (remember lining up back in 1980?)1 user thanked author for this post.
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Threw on Pulp Fiction last night when I had friends over (Game night).
We all could not keep that as a background movie. Draws your attention and you can’t let go.Honestly over-played back in the day, so I’ve avoided it for a while, but this is a fucking good movie.
John Travolta? Awesome and good for him. (She’s fuckin’ dyin’ on me man…)With Tarantino, I put Inglorious Basterds as #1, then Pulp Fiction and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood are 2 and 3 (depending on mood).
All are good, and everything is subjective, but I pray his next and last movie knocks it out of the park and he gets the Best Director Oscar (should’ve already had one).As I have a limited viewpoint, and obviously others are better with Asian and European movies…
I could put Tarantino as Best Western Director.
Speilberg should’ve stopped, Paul Thomas Anderson sometimes tells a story I have no interest in, and Christopher Nolan threw it away with Tenet.
Kubrick vs. Tarantino is the argument.So of course with my texting as I’m putting forth all this typing energy, a few text replys come in.
Yes, time will tell with Alejandro Inarritu, Denis Villeneuve, and others.
But how could I have forgotten the Coen Brothers?Ahh! Not going to re-do this, prefer to walk away. Thankfully I previously said “everything is subjective”.
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Yeah, it’s probably the Coens for me, or Jarmusch or Croneberg or Lynch, but those are obviously very personal choices just because I love the kind of stories these directors tell.
I watched Bullet Train, which was entertaining if not as clever as it wanted to be. What it wants to be is a Guy Ritchie movie, but it’s siller and just less well done than that. But it’s also still fun to watch, and at its best it’s a bit like watching a violent cartoon with some Rube-Goldberg stuff going on.
Also watched Uncharted, which was very by-the-numbers, had obvious and generic dialogue, lacked a compelling narrative, and had some very mediocre to bad acting in it (much as I generally love Holland, he was just alright, Wahlberg was pretty bad and Sophia Ali was terrible).
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