What have you been watching lately?
You Have Been Watching
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Man, I hope they do renew it, it’s too good to leave it like that… but hey, I think it’s well worth watching even as is. They really pushed the quality to the limit with this show.
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I stayed up late to watch Saint Maud last night. I’ve been looking forward to it for a long time, especially after the level of reviews it has been getting.
What load of absolutely fucking bullshit.
‘Horror masterpiece’ ‘terrifying’
The most terrifying thing about this movie is that horror fans like myself are constantly being fooled into paying to watch movies like this and Relic that don’t do anything close to what it says on the tin.
Its another slow burn ‘elevated horror’ bollocks for chin stroking cunts.
If the reviews had not been so ridiculously overblown and I had just stumbled across this I would have judged it as an interesting little curiosity, that outstayed it’s welcome and made me fall asleep, even at 80 mins running time and never thought about it again.
A fun watch with a few beers this is not.
Instead I’m coming away angry at an overrated, disappointing and pretentious movie that even the normally reliable Mark Kermode has been sucked in by.
if you have seen Relic, Hereditary, The Witch or any of the other Ari Aster wannabe movies that have infiltrated the horror genre with their promises of terror that will shock you to the core and then fizzle our like a fucking firework while the one trick pony, smug hipster wankers who made it lap up the praise while desperately trying to conjure up ideas for their next horror-not-horror masterpiece, then you know what to expect here. And if that’s yer bag then this will be too.
But ohhhh it’s so multilayered. Fuck off.
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When people mention Relic, I always just think of the nineties movie.
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I used https://takeout.google.com/ to download my Youtube viewing history, and was able to calculate that I have watched 7,469 Youtube videos in the last year. The records go back to October 2010; I’ve watched 27,235 videos since then.
A lot of the recent ones come from just going through various comedy channels that have been around since 2006 and pressing “Play All” and watching 15 years of 2-3 minute videos.
I was also able to see that I’ve made 5,274 searches on Youtube since October 2011. The first one was for “Robot Chicken,” the second was for “pulls hapes,” by which I assume I meant “Pull Shapes.”
I had to search to find that, so I’m now up to 5,275.
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Coming 2 America: The first movie was about an extraordinary person from a fantasy land visiting a place familiar to the audience and dealing with issues that are normal to us in an extraordinary way. There is probably a name for this trope.
The second movie does that in reverse, and it’s nowhere near as funny. An ordinary man goes to an extra ordinary place and setting. Seeing Lavelle Johnson and his mom deal with luxury and feats like hunting whiskers of wild lions just isn’t nearly as funny as seeing Akeem and Semmi deal with hokey landlords and mopping the floors of fast-food joints. It just wasn’t relatable in the same way.
But Wesley Snipes as a fashionable next-door warmonger with a flair for theatrics was pretty funny, I gotta admit. And the movie has a few moments. But ultimately, reversing the trope didn’t work for me at all.
Final verdict: No! Watch the original instead.
Raya and the last dragon: This is some S-tier Disney princess stuff. Not quite as song-and-dancey as some of them, meaning perhaps that parents won’t be stuck listening to their young ones completely shredding the main theme quite as much as the one from Moana, and it has some great adventure. And holy dragon gems, some of the characters are just so CUTE!! Look at this guy:
Final verdict: Yes! Definitely going to rewatch this at some point.
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There’s not much to speculate about in Raya though. Maybe, ‘what kind of animal is Tuk Tuk’…?
It’s a Mephisto!
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Wife’s playlist came up with Pure Shores by All Saints during dinner and we reminisced about The Beach being one of our first shared cinema experiences and how it’s not really a thing anymore, that film, despite the hype and attention at the time. Picking what to watch after dinner we opted out of Royal Tenenbaums and on whim saw Ex Machina was available – sure, why not? Who’s the director again? Why, it’s the same guy who wrote The Beach novel.
All I knew about the film was that it involved robots and Oscar Isaacs dances in it – that’s it, so the whole thing was a surprise. It was captivating and very attractively presented. I think Alaine enjoyed it more than I did and wanted to talk about it some more this morning. It’s a cool, small film.
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I liked Ex Machina a lot.
If you like Garland’s stuff I can recommend the TV show Devs. It has some similarities to Ex Machina but is quite a different story too. Very well done.
I liked Annihilation a lot as well, but that one is quite different in tone, much more of a horror movie (although I guess Ex Machina gets that way towards the end!).
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Meh. I thought Ex Machina was decent enough but I didn’t like the ending. It felt pretty like something we’ve seen dozens of times before. It was unoriginal and failed to deliver something new or interesting.
FTFY, Todd.
Hope you’re mending well.
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The Beach being one of our first shared cinema experiences and how it’s not really a thing anymore
The Beach is quite commentary on our approach, in the movie it was sold as a deserted beach, in fact it is Maya Beach, not far for from the popular tourist destination of Phuket which is fairly close to where I live. It is so packed with tourists they had a waiting list for boats to get near.
It has been closed since 2018 because tourists pissing in the water caused damage to the coral reefs.
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I liked Ex Machina for Alicia Vikander’s performance. The way she is able to manipulate poor Caleb was fascinating. plus this:
![EX MACHINA Official Trailer (2015) [HD] - YouTube](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/XYGzRB4Pnq8/maxresdefault.jpg)
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Binging a short-lived 80’s sitcom called Jennifer Slept Here on YouTube. The premise for those who might not remember: 14-year-old Joey (John P. Navin Jr.) moves with his parents and little sister into a house previously owned by Jennifer Farrell (Ann Jillian), a deceased movie star/sex symbol. Yet Jennifer’s ghost still haunts the place, visible only to Joey.
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Jennifer Slept Here
I remember Ann Jillian well, but I have absolutely no recollection of this show. Is it any good?
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Jennifer Slept Here
I remember Ann Jillian well, but I have absolutely no recollection of this show. Is it any good?
It was kinda flat, to be honest. Probably could have been better.
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Rewatched Moana, which is still fantastic. Definitely one of my favourite recent animated movies. It takes longer for her to get off the island than I remembered (half an hour). Interestingly, I rewatched Aladdin, from the same directors, a few weeks ago, and it takes almost exactly the same time for Maui to show up in Moana as for Genie to show up in that movie.
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The Empty Man – Horror movie from last year, based on a Cullen Bunn/Vanessa Del Rey comic, that completely went under my radar and most everyone else’s too. I ended up loving it and I hope it becomes a cult hit. I’ve seen it getting talked up on social media lately so maybe that’s happening.
It’s long, nearly 2.5 hours, which is unusual for a horror film but it really works here. This isn’t a slow movie, in fact it it packs a lot in. I haven’t read the comic but I wouldn’t be surprised if the film adapts each arc of the comic, meaning every 20-30 min the film switches gears as a new facet of the central conspiracy is revealed that the ex-cop protagonist must investigate as he searches for a missing girl. It shouldn’t work, it should feel stuffed to the gills, but the director, a David Fincher protege (his influence is strongly felt), makes it all unfold seamlessly.
Also, the first 25 min acts as it’s own short horror film, with a different cast from the rest of the film. This helps justify the runtime imo as it’s basically two films in one. The stories do connect but it’s not clear how until the ending.
The trailers sell this as a Candyman-esque story about a monster you can summon who follows certain rules: on the first day you hear him; on the second you see him; on the third he gets you. But it quickly morphs into something much more expansive, with a really intricate lore involving a shady self-help organization and occult happenings from Bhutan to middle America. Tying it all up are some chilling existentialist themes though these take a back seat to the mystery, paranoia, and horror.
Give this movie a chance and I think you’ll be very happy with it, like I was.
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Watched Captive State, as it had popped up on Netflix. I was a bit surprised I didn’t know about this one from any trailers from when it was released in 2019. The setting is that the Earth has been invaded by aliens, but they remain behind the scenes and let their human collaborators do their work, so you’ve basically just got a police state and the movie focuses on a freedom fighter/terrorist cell planning an attack on an alien ambassador. As such, it’s not bad – it’s kinda murky visually, but they do manage to hide what I assume was a pretty low budget; nothing looks exactly cheap, in part though because you just can’t see things clearly enough – and I like that the movie doesn’t fuck around: you’re just thrown into the scenario and follow the tense plot of underground cell going through with their attack. That’s also the problem though – there’s not a lot of world-building, and you don’t get to know the characters well enough to care about them. John Goodman’s playing the antagonist human cop, though, and he’s as awesome as always. So, yeah, mixed bag, but interesting enough.
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Tonight we’re watching Who Framed Roger Rabbit. No amount of CGI in the world could ever wow me like this movie does every time. Technically it’s just incredible – even now I can’t imagine how some of it was done.
The kids are loving it too – both for the toons and the “how was this made?” aspect.
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More4 have finally started airing the fourth series of the Good Fight, about a year after it aired in the US. Given the topical and zeitgeisty nature of the show, the delay hasn’t done it any favours – this first episode has Diane in an alternate reality (sort of) where Hillary Clinton won the election in 2016, which feels a bit like ancient history having lived through 2020.
Still, it’s an interesting episode. The previous series ended with Diane being SWATed and so it’s not hard to guess that this is a coma-esque fantasy after that. But what makes it work is that the show – which has been openly political and anti-Trump for the entirety of its run – doesn’t paint the Clinton presidency as some kind of utopia (a cure for cancer aside). It has the Clinton administration tied deeply with Harvey Weinstein, who was never challenged over his sexual assaults because there was no #MeToo movement. Diane’s attempts to start it herself are stomped on by the administration because women being angry with men doesn’t play into Hillary’s re-election hopes. It’s all depressingly plausible.
The other really interesting aspect of the episode is that it demonstrates how far the show’s evolved beyond the Good Wife. That was funny and topical too, but the Good Fight has taken all that to the next level. Almost Joker-esque in a way – the comedian that’s realised that the whole world’s a joke and nothing matters. In the world of the Trump presidency, doing political satire and topical drama became so… I don’t know, something that the show broke beyond the confines of a scripted drama and started adding musical numbers and parody political education animated shorts and breaking the fourth wall to talk about the Overton Window.
You have to wonder how it will cope with the Biden administration and its (supposed) return to mundanity.
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Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri.
That was a very good movie about grief and rage. And compared to his other movies, it feels like McDonough has grown up a little (I don’t mean that in a disparaging way, In Bruges is still my favourite, but after 7 Psychopaths was a big search for something to say that never really found that thing (and cleverly made that the movie, but still), it seems like he’s found that now). And as usually, McDonough allows his actors to really shine; everybody is amazing, especially Frances McDormand, of course.
I think there was a bit of discussion here as to whether it was okay for this movie to ultimately find sympathy for Dixon, who kind of turns from antagonist to co-protagonist towards the end of the movie. Personally, it works for me. People aren’t just one thing, and ultimately there should be hope for change for anybody.
One thing I found rather more problematic that stood out to me here is a tendency to play “dumb young chick” characters for laughs. That’s a daft and aged trope, and one that diminishes the movie.
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I think there was a bit of discussion here as to whether it was okay for this movie to ultimately find sympathy for Dixon, who kind of turns from antagonist to co-protagonist towards the end of the movie. Personally, it works for me. People aren’t just one thing, and ultimately there should be hope for change for anybody.
Yeah, in some ways I think it’s only become more relevant since its release. In the current climate you’d probably see even fewer people getting behind that kind of nuanced and complex character.
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I watched Ex Machina again yesterday, since it’s been a while since I last saw it. I still think it’s a very ho-hum story told in a boring way. I find most of Garland’s work a triumph of style over substance. You could leave the room for 10 minutes at a time and still catch up easily with what’s going on when you came back. Devs was much the same – almost like the cinematic equivalent of elevator music.
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Wife suggested Fantastic Mr Fox as the movie for last night – it’s fine. Some funny moments, but nothing mind-blowing.
That film is worth watching over and over again just to see the moment when Badger suddenly and briefly shows his feral side.
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Tonight we’re watching Who Framed Roger Rabbit. No amount of CGI in the world could ever wow me like this movie does every time. Technically it’s just incredible – even now I can’t imagine how some of it was done.
The kids are loving it too – both for the toons and the “how was this made?” aspect.
I got on this right after Endgame today, and I found this:
So the Valiant brothers dad is… Sacha Baron Cohen?
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You could leave the room for 10 minutes at a time and still catch up easily with what’s going on when you came back. Devs was much the same – almost like the cinematic equivalent of elevator music.
Wow, you definitely read these things differently from me. While I didn’t think Ex Machina fully realised its potential in exploring its themes, it had very sharp dialogue and great characterisation, which is all you need in a chamber play, and Devs was actually a pretty tight series instead of its often slow pace, and managed to be absolutely tense all the way through. Couldn’t look away for a second there.
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Yeah, in an era of sprawling tv shows that take many seasons to get to the point I thought Devs explored some pretty heady ideas well in a tight handful of episodes, with a lot of tension and intrigue throughout.
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I disagree, I thought it was really interesting how the film landed on the idea that maybe the key aspect of human sentience is our ability to recognize and manipulate social constructs (in this case gender roles).
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After watching Falcon and Winter Soldier I turned on Outside the Wire on Netflix. Anthony Mackie plays an Artificial Human Marine in a future US army. He is very good in this movie and you never quite tell where he is coming from until the end. His Charisma and athleticism make the movie. I loved this line from the movie and I have this feeling that Mackie sent this scene to Chris Evans after he filmed it. Leo is Mackie’s character and Harp is a noob soldier assigned to work with him.
Leo: Do you ever wonder why I look like this, Harp?
Harp: What? Chiseled cheekbones?
Funny. Why would the Pentagon pick my face to represent the United States Marines? Why wouldn’t they make me a blond haired, blue eyed, all-American varsity peckerwood? -
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So I got a new iPhone this week and, I’m not saying they’re desperate or anything, but Apple gave me a free year of Apple TV+ (their streaming platform) with it.
Yeah, that offer was there when they first started, and was supposed to have expired last year, but they’ve stretched it out to July. I was able to redeem it without even buying my own device; my mother got a new iPhone and we have family sharing set up and that was enough to give me a free year too.
I enjoy Dickinson on there too, and The Morning Show (eventually), but not enough that I’ll pay for a subscription once my free year expires. I’ll probably wait until Ted Lasso S2 finishes and pay for a month to binge it.
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There doesn’t appear to be a huge amount on it, but I’ve dived into Ted Lasso and it is excellent.
For all Mankind is pretty fantastic, you should check that one out.
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That’s the Soviet space thing
It’s about NASA after the Russians get to the moon first. It’s the best thing on TV at the moment.
Ted Laso is as good as everyone says.
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Watched the first three episodes of Invincible that are on prime. I’m enjoying it so far. The voice cast is fantastic and It does a good job capturing the feel of the early issues of the comic. The animation is great in some places, like the action sequences. But in more talky scenes the characters look a bit lifeless, especially around the eyes. Hopefully this’ll be a success, I’d love to see later arcs like the Viltrumite War being adapted.
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I’m tempted by Invincible but am put off by the animation. I’m not a huge fan of that style – it’s totally put me off all the DC animated films too.
We watched In To The Spiderverse last night and it was fantastic. A joy to look at and genuinely edge of the seat exciting at times. Nicholas Cage was a hoot too.
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I saw a film, in the cinema!
Godzilla v Kong. This film is, as the trailer suggests, complete and utter nonsense, it was also declared by my 9 year old son to be the greatest movie ever made.
To fully enjoy it you need to channel that inner 9 year old boy. It’s very silly, the dialogue is awful, it embraces every cliche known to man but there’s also loads of big things fighting and smashing everything to smithereens.
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Just finished rewatching the first two seasons of Succession. Brian Cox is just incredible – his Logan Roy is a force of nature. I’m reading a bunch of old Thor comics at the moment and Odin is such a dick to his kids that I hear the voice of Logan Roy in my head when he speaks. So yeah… Odin is Scottish now.
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I saw a film, in the cinema!
Godzilla v Kong. This film is, as the trailer suggests, complete and utter nonsense, it was also declared by my 9 year old son to be the greatest movie ever made.
To fully enjoy it you need to channel that inner 9 year old boy. It’s very silly, the dialogue is awful, it embraces every cliche known to man but there’s also loads of big things fighting and smashing everything to smithereens.
This is why I loved Pacific Rim so much. I was 10 years old again and loving every minute of it. It was not great or good. It was just fun.
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I watched it, I kinda liked the animation, because it looked like the book… or at least what I remeber the book looking like… so I thought the animation style fit…
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This is why I loved Pacific Rim so much. I was 10 years old again and loving every minute of it. It was not great or good. It was just fun.
This is a very similar vibe in all honesty. Absolute B movie script and plot, blockbuster level effects and cast.
I’d say if someone didn’t like Pacific Rim, definitely don’t bother with this but if you did – go ahead.
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Watched “Shimmer Lake”, a two or three year old Netflix thing. It’a small-town noir crime thing that is told in chapters going backwards for no particular reason – there’s some nice bits in revealing things that were mentioned before, but overall the backwards thing is just a gimmick really. The plot is nicely enough built though, even if the resolution is yawningly outside of suspension of disbelief. It has Rainn Wilson, and Benjamin Walker actually turns in a very good performance.
Overall, it was alright. If you feel in the mood for some Fargo-light small town crime movie with comedy bits and some ambition in the way it’s told, you could do worse.
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So yeah… Odin is Scottish now.
Rubbish. Odin is clearly Welsh.
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Yesterday we watched four episodes of an AMC series (currently on Hulu) from 2018 called THE TERROR, based on a book by author Dan Simmons. With Ciaran Hinds, Jared Harris, and Tobias Menzies in the lead roles, this is a well-acted, well-written and well-directed horror story that begins with a true event (the ill-fated British Royal Navy expedition to complete the leg of the Northwest Passage through the Canadian Arctic) and speculates about what may have happened to the ships and crew.
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You didn’t mention it’s a Ridley Scott thing!
I watched the Terror during that terribly hot summer last year and loved how it allowed me to forget how hot it was and feel cold with the character. The portrayal of the stranded crew is absolutely amazing, and I loved the historical setting and how lovingly that was captured. Plus, it really is an absolutely terrifying idea, being stranded in the ice with resources running low and something hunting you.
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but I think I’d still be pretty nervous sitting inside a room for two hours with a bunch of strangers. How did you and your family (I assume you didn’t go alone) feel being there?
Fine to be honest.
The truth is our numbers have always been very low. We can’t be cavalier as Audrey’s 80 year old mum lives with us but equally pretty much all the infection here has been with factory workers.
A variety of stats suggest to me the indoor thing is probably not as influential as people think. The climate never changes here, as they have opened up more the numbers have reduced. I don’t know why.
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Agree on pretty much all of that. Weaving in the alternate dimensions so quickly was a mistake, I think.
And a lot of it felt very flat and empty to me – I know that animating the daemons must take a lot of time and effort but there were lots of scenes (including big crowded moments) where they felt completely absent.
I watched most of season one but couldn’t actually make it to the end.
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I’ve also been watching bits of Assassination Classroom with the kid, and we’ve now finished season 1. It’s great fun and crazy in a way only anime can be: The setup is that the students of the E-class (the worst students of the school, everybody looks down at them and is terrified of failing in tests and being shuffled into this class because it’s the end of anything you might want to achieve in life) gets a new teacher. The teacher is a kind of huge yellow octopus monster who has destroyed part of the moon and then announced he’d destroy Earth in a while, too, but until then he wants to teach that particular class. And in return for being allowed to do that, the students may try to kill him, which is next to impossible because he has like super-speed and such. So they’re being trained to be assassins and keep trying to kill their teacher while at the same time he just teaches them like a normal class. And when they aren’t trying to kill him, it turns out he’s a super great teacher and all he’s like all Dead Poet’s Society and helps every single one of them deal with their issues in life and become better people and better students.
It’s amazingly bonkers, we’re having a hoot with this.
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Randomly tuned in to The Nice Guys (which I had seen a few years ago) – a great little retro crime film, with Gosling probably at his best. It’s one of those films you wish led to a few sequels; Gosling and Crowe are so good together.
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Randomly tuned in to The Nice Guys (which I had seen a few years ago) – a great little retro crime film, with Gosling probably at his best. It’s one of those films you wish led to a few sequels; Gosling and Crowe are so good together.
I enjoyed that movie. It was so much fun. I definitely wanted more.
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Godzilla vs. Kong is really stupid, but also pretty fun. The story is full of holes both figurative and literal – holes big enough for a planet – but it does fit in with the Heisei period. It is a little more fantasy driven and you can’t take a lot of it seriously at all, but animals the size of skyscrapers doesn’t really invite that in the first place.
At heart, it is exactly what it intends to be, and no more than that.
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I wonder if they’ll make more sequels though, it kinda feels like there’s nothing else to do now…
It sounds like they are done with them.
https://screenrant.com/godzilla-kong-no-monsterverse-movies-planned-reason/
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Well good, I guess… They could still go for some more, but what for… they just made the main event. Still, as with everything else, if this does well enough, I’m sure they’ll decide to go on… after all: F&F…
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I know not many people like G1, but I actually like it quite a bit…
I like Godzilla 1. It’s not that enthralling a story really but I like the way Edwards directs it so almost all of the time the events are from a person’s perspective. If something falls on a car then the camera shot is from inside the car looking up etc. I found that made it quite immersive.
The reviews here on GvK seem pretty much in line with mine last week, a bit like the Venom film it’s a lot of nonsense really but manages to remain entertaining.
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I’ve been rewatching The Wire recently, and in series 3 and 4 one of the names the slingers have for the heroin is Pandemic. Weird how WMD hit one way when the show was on, and Pandemic does differently now.
Weirdly it’s one of the first things I thought of when the pandemic hit. That refrain of such a (then) unusual word stuck with me.
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I started watching the Baz Luhrmann Romeo + Juliet with my daughter tonight as she has started reading Shakespeare stories (simplified kids versions) and wanted to see some of the real thing.
There’s something really magical about this film. Not just in how it takes the Shakespeare and makes it accessible and understandable, but also in the style, the staging and the performances.
Dicaprio and Danes are just so pretty and young here, and their first meeting (the fishtank scene) is beautiful, a really electric moment. I was worried this wouldn’t hold up, but aside from the very 90s trappings in places it really does.
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Given the wealth of new material available on various streaming platforms we’ve decided to go back to the 90s and do an X-Files rewatch. Some dodgy FX that really stand out due to it streaming in HD but other than that most episodes hold up really well (the killer computer episode feels a bit dated but it probably did when it first aired anyway).
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That one is dated for sure but also oddly more relevant nowadays than back then, what with smart home technology and all. What if Alexa turned heel?
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Given the wealth of new material available on various streaming platforms we’ve decided to go back to the 90s and do an X-Files rewatch. Some dodgy FX that really stand out due to it streaming in HD but other than that most episodes hold up really well (the killer computer episode feels a bit dated but it probably did when it first aired anyway).
I started an X-Files rewatch some years ago and thought the first season was generally pretty solid. There were some good episodes in season two as well, but in general I felt it tailed off a lot quicker than I remembered. Be interested to know how you get on with it.
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Given the wealth of new material available on various streaming platforms we’ve decided to go back to the 90s and do an X-Files rewatch. Some dodgy FX that really stand out due to it streaming in HD but other than that most episodes hold up really well (the killer computer episode feels a bit dated but it probably did when it first aired anyway).
I started an X-Files rewatch some years ago and thought the first season was generally pretty solid. There were some good episodes in season two as well, but in general I felt it tailed off a lot quicker than I remembered. Be interested to know how you get on with it.
We’ve attempted this a few times in the past before but never made it past the end of the third season. I don’t recall the reasons for this but a dip in quality may very well explain it.
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Wasn’t that around the same time that Chris Carter started working on the first movie? Burning the candle at both ends may have taken a toll on him and the show.
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I don’t know about that but I do remember the show’s overarching storyline getting increasingly convoluted and feeling like it didn’t make very much sense.
It’s funny, as a teenager I was always really excited whenever there was a “mythology” episode that took the overall story arc forwards and revealed something new, and I often felt like the non-mythology episodes were padding that got in the way of that.
But as an adult I feel like the standalone episodes are often the high point – something like Darkness Falls (the one with the green insect things in the woods that kill you if you move out of the light) is a great little slice of TV horror.
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I started watching the Baz Luhrmann Romeo + Juliet with my daughter tonight as she has started reading Shakespeare stories (simplified kids versions) and wanted to see some of the real thing.
There’s something really magical about this film. Not just in how it takes the Shakespeare and makes it accessible and understandable, but also in the style, the staging and the performances.
Dicaprio and Danes are just so pretty and young here, and their first meeting (the fishtank scene) is beautiful, a really electric moment. I was worried this wouldn’t hold up, but aside from the very 90s trappings in places it really does.
I’ve seen that one multiple times now, because I’ve taught Romeo and Juliet a few times in class, and it’s always great fun to watch it again. Baz Luhrmann is a great director.
Since I’ve also had to watch it with an analytical eye – here’s a thing about the fish tank: Throughout the movie, the water motif is connected to both love and death. They see each other through the fish tank, they kiss in the pool and so on. On the other hand, there’s a moment in the movie where we see Juliet’s face under water, still as if she were dead (she’s only doing her bath routine actually), and when Tybalt is killed, he falls into a water fountain (with Romeo standing in the pouring rain). There was more, but I forget.
It’s a movie that rewards multiple close viewings, and it’s just such fun at the same time.
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Watched Korean space sci-fi flick Space Sweepers. Actually less crazy and less B-movie-ish than I thought, but still a lot of fun. And extremely high production value for a Netflix thing. Standard plot, but pretty good world-building. One of the nice things about it is the diversity of the cast – outside of the main cast, there’s people speaking Danish, Russion, Chinese, Spanish, French… The weakest point is the antagonist, the strongest is the crew and the visuals.
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Since I’ve also had to watch it with an analytical eye – here’s a thing about the fish tank: Throughout the movie, the water motif is connected to both love and death. They see each other through the fish tank, they kiss in the pool and so on. On the other hand, there’s a moment in the movie where we see Juliet’s face under water, still as if she were dead (she’s only doing her bath routine actually), and when Tybalt is killed, he falls into a water fountain (with Romeo standing in the pouring rain). There was more, but I forget.
Yes, I picked up on that a bit as I was watching this time. Juliet’s first appearance is that eerie shot with her head underwater in the bath, and then that shot is mirrored later with Romeo at the party when he puts his head in the basin as he goes to the bathroom, just before he meets her.
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I don’t know about that but I do remember the show’s overarching storyline getting increasingly convoluted and feeling like it didn’t make very much sense.
It’s funny, as a teenager I was always really excited whenever there was a “mythology” episode that took the overall story arc forwards and revealed something new, and I often felt like the non-mythology episodes were padding that got in the way of that.
But as an adult I feel like the standalone episodes are often the high point – something like Darkness Falls (the one with the green insect things in the woods that kill you if you move out of the light) is a great little slice of TV horror.
Agreed 100%. There was nothing better back in the day than getting a tiny sliver of the truth revealed. Now, knowing that it all leads to nowhere in particular has dampened my interest in going back even for the standalone episodes.
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Yes, I picked up on that a bit as I was watching this time. Juliet’s first appearance is that eerie shot with her head underwater in the bath, and then that shot is mirrored later with Romeo at the party when he puts his head in the basin as he goes to the bathroom, just before he meets her.
Right! And the image of him in the water is repeated in Juliet’s vision of seeing Romeo dead when she says goodbye to him after he’s killed Tybalt. (Also, Mercutio dies by the sea, of course.)
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Yes, I picked up on that a bit as I was watching this time. Juliet’s first appearance is that eerie shot with her head underwater in the bath, and then that shot is mirrored later with Romeo at the party when he puts his head in the basin as he goes to the bathroom, just before he meets her.
Right! And the image of him in the water is repeated in Juliet’s vision of seeing Romeo dead when she says goodbye to him after he’s killed Tybalt. (Also, Mercutio dies by the sea, of course.)
We had to break off halfway through watching last night so I’ll keep an eye out for this stuff when we finish it later.
Are there any other good accessible Shakespeare adaptations you’d recommend for watching with kids (she’s 10)?
I saw that the Fassbender Macbeth from a few years ago is free on Amazon Prime and wondered about trying that, as we’ve read a version of the story together and I remember Macbeth as being relatively easy to grasp in general when I was a kid.
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Are there any other good accessible Shakespeare adaptations you’d recommend for watching with kids (she’s 10)?
I say just sit her down with Throne of Blood and see how it goes.
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