What have you been watching lately?
You Have Been Watching
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Lord of the Flies
the colonial settlement of the Americas
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NO SUDDEN MOVE on HBO Max starring a lot of great actors. All the famous actors (Cheadle, Harbour, Hamm, Fraser, Liotta, Del Toro, Bill Duke, etc.) did great jobs, but the women in the movie Amy Seimetz, Julia Fox and Noah Jupe who played a similar role in Suburbicon also stood out. The story by Ed Solomon is very well written, but a little hard to follow. You can’t casually watch the movie. As far as directing, really, it’s pretty invisible. Nothing particularly notable and it doesn’t get in the way of the acting. Like a lot of the more interesting crime stories such as Chinatown, LA Confidential (and even Who Framed Roger Rabbit), the central mystery or driving force of the violence has to do with actual historic conspiracies but in this case set in Detroit rather than Los Angeles.
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Just finished THE TOMORROW WAR.
I wish I had watched NO SUDDEN MOVE instead. I think my biggest disappointment with the film is that there is literally nothing in those 2:20 hours that I haven’t seen before (and presented better) in a half-dozen other films. A bit of STARSHIP TROOPERS here, some EDGE OF TOMORROW there, and so on. Chris Pratt was fine here, but he was not serviced well by the story or the direction.
Oh, well, at least it didn’t demand my full attention, as the overly dramatic music let me know when something was about to happen.
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Sooo… we got 6 months of free HBOmax here in Mexico (damn, the really want to boost their numbers), so I activated the promo to see hwat was in there, and I watched Barry, a series will Bill Hader, which was okay… I don’t know what to watch though… Oh also, for some unkown reason, it doesn’t wanna give me even 1080p video which sucks… maybe it’s some dumb anti-piracy thing… I don’t know, but it’s stupid they do that kind of shit… they’re not stopping pirates, and they’re just messing up with customers…
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(For those who don’t know, Talking Pictures is exclusively re-runs of mostly forgotten 60s and 70s programmes and obscure black-and-white movies.)
My favourite bit about Talking Pictures TV is that it’s a national television channel that’s run by a man and his daughter from an office in their garden and gets better ratings than MTV or National Geographic.
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/entertainment-arts-53111684
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My Robin Williams binge is a great success, last night I watched Cadillac Man. Hadn’t seen that one before, and it had some nice laughs to spare. And some great-to-horrible eighties trends on full display. I read on IMDb that Al Pacino was the first choice for Joey and… wow, that would have been a different beast. Robin Williams was a great fit for this role.
Tonight I’ll get on Moscow on the Hudson, and if I have the time and strength to watch two RW’s, I’ll slip in Patch Adams too.
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On the other hand, saving Patch Adams till the end means you can drink as much as you need to in order to get through it and no big deal if you pass out for the night.
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Wow, the hate for Patch Adams is interesting. Now I really want to see it.
I actually haven’t seen it, but by all accounts it’s a pale imitator of Good Morning Vietnam.
So the films ends with Patch Adams being sent on a patrol in Viet Cong territory?
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I actually haven’t seen it, but by all accounts it’s a pale imitator of Good Morning Vietnam.
Wait…
a pale imitator
They replaced Jimmy Wah with a white guy?
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I remember liking Patch Adams, even with the dark turns it takes. Now Jack…Jack is a bloody bizarre film.
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So I decided to open up re-watching a season One, but stopping right there (if that’s the best).
Don’t fall in love again and feel you have to follow through.Picked Homeland. I watched right until the end, but the first is the best.
If you’ve never seen it (the first season), it is highly recommended.I liked everything again, but never got back to that first time viewing.
Just can’t when you know what’s coming.
This way, that way, sideways, unexpected ways.
Beautiful the first time around, great job people.
Just can’t get it back, but to be fair I am talking about a high that few achieve.Season one aired on Showtime from Oct. 2nd 2011 to Dec. 18th 2011. 12 episodes.
“I missed something once before. I won’t, I can’t let that happen again.”
“It was ten years ago. Everyone missed something that day.”The cast is great. Claire Danes is great with what she goes through (maybe overused in the future, but we’re only judging season one.
Damian Lewis is very good (just maybe not what I thought first time around, with Band of Brothers memories).
Mandy Patinkin could walk into my house and convince me of anything. Just fits perfectly.
Morena Baccarin does the beautiful housewife great, but not overly sexualized fanboy serving (almost).
Diego Klattenhoff looks so young in the first episode (and yes, I kept expecting him to say ‘Reddington’ for a few episodes).
David Harewood, didn’t expect J’onn J’onzz after the first episode (he fit his role).
Chris Chalk? Oh yeah, he’s Lucius Fox (Gotham) or his role in Perry Mason.
And if you want to slap a self-righteous prick in the face, Jamey Sheridan fits the bill perfectly.All-in-all I enjoyed it again, but I do stick to what I said.
Never seen? Yes you should, even go to season 2. Just never achieves that level after that.
Have seen? Can’t get it back (but to stay positive I did enjoy it). -
I liked Homeland a lot but it went off the rails for me after that great first season. They never hit those heights again. I stuck with it for quite a while but bailed around season six as it just got too silly and convoluted.
Part of me feels like it was a victim of its own success. If it had been a single self-contained season with no eye to a follow-up then they could have gone through with some much more daring developments at the end (as far as the bombing is concerned.)
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I watched I Think You Should Leave last night. Overall, it was just okay for me. There were some amusing bits but nothing that made me burst out laughing. Even though each episode is about 15 minutes, some of the sketches went on a bit too long. I appreciate Tim Robinson’s restraint in that he does not appear in every sketch but you definitely feel his influence in the writing.
It’s not a bad way to spend over an hour but for me, it didn’t blow me away.
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We watched the first three eps of Mare of Easttown tonight; really solid small town crime show, with great performances from Winslet especially. There’s some clunky expository dialogue in episode 1 but it dies down by the second ep. Lots of characters, lots of interwoven pasts (Winslet’s detective character is divorced, her cousin is a priest in town, she was a star basketballer for the local school’s team – she has connections to pretty much everyone in town), a great atmosphere and lots of character info delivered by the sets rather than words.
I didn’t even recognise that Wandavision/X-Men’s Quicksilver is in this.
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Watched Gunpowder Milkshake last night. I really liked it. It is like a female ‘John Wick’ but being female, they did not fight by themselves. The Library fight was awesome. Gillen(stunt double) is a master of movement. Her fight in the hospital was so inventive. Also enjoyed the choreographer’s use of everything that was used as weapons. I liked that the finale was a call back to the elevator scene.
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Watched “Mank”, which was a very well-made portrait of these people and their time, but one of those cases in which I don’t think they’d have gotten any Oscar nominations if it hadn’t been, you know, about Hollywood. I mean, I think you really do have to be interested in Hollywood’s early years and these larger-than-life characters (especially Hearst), and Orson Welles and how Citizen Kane was made, in the first place for this to be a really involving movie.
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Yeah, and most of the points the movie makes about the authorship of the screenplay have been fairly well challenged since Kael’s article but anyone who sees the movie won’t see the other side of that debate.
Still, honestly, it is not really about Citizen Kane and that makes the final few scenes feel really out of place. The central conflict is not Welles and Mankiewicz but primarily Mank and Hearst, and the source of that conflict is Mank’s guilt over complicity in essentially becoming a well-paid tool for the powerful and wealthy.
Really, the conflict over the credit actually feels like it comes out of nowhere. Through the rest of the film, Welles seems extremely supportive of a potentially destructive writer on an already precarious production. The majority of the film’s real drama is in the flashbacks with Mank increasingly coming into conflict with the powerful studios and the even more powerful W. R. Hearst for whom the studios do the dirty work promoting his political and economic interests and points of view in popular culture.
In the end, the screenplay credit seems a paltry attempt at revenge against Hearst, but it only ends up supporting the substance of Hearst’s final snub of the writer. Mank simply trades organ grinders from Hearst to the much farther down the ladder Orson Welles. He remains the dancing monkey in the stories of other more interesting and influential men.
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Although I love Fincher and my podcast buddy/man-crush raved about Mank, I haven’t seen Citizen Kane and have pretty much no interest in Mank.
It’s 2am here and we just finished Mare of Easttown, eps 4-7. What a great show. Great performances; I can’t stress that enough – up there with Chernobyl and Succession of projects from the past few years. I teared up a few times over these episodes; just great lines and great delivery.
(And man, Winslet is stunningly pretty.)
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I watched Pig today.
Movie of the year material right here. Very restrained and raw, very sad and bleak. Not quite “The Road” bleak, but but still. Nicolas Cage is not so Nicolas Cage as one could expect from a movie with this premise (truffle pig goes missing, reclusive owner comes out of self-imposed isolation to track it down).
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Cage would go on to win an Oscar for his work here. A nomination at the very least must be on the cards.
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Really, the conflict over the credit actually feels like it comes out of nowhere. Through the rest of the film, Welles seems extremely supportive of a potentially destructive writer on an already precarious production. The majority of the film’s real drama is in the flashbacks with Mank increasingly coming into conflict with the powerful studios and the even more powerful W. R. Hearst for whom the studios do the dirty work promoting his political and economic interests and points of view in popular culture.
Yeah, that’s very true.
In the end, the screenplay credit seems a paltry attempt at revenge against Hearst, but it only ends up supporting the substance of Hearst’s final snub of the writer. Mank simply trades organ grinders from Hearst to the much farther down the ladder Orson Welles. He remains the dancing monkey in the stories of other more interesting and influential men.
I think that’s maybe the point there though. They’re showing Mank at least keeping his integrity when it comes to his work, standing up for himself and achieving success in spite of being shunned by everybody. I suppose it’s a way to end his story on a positive note.
Cheers for the links, by the way, the clip was very interesting. As always with these kinds of movies, it’s good to know some more about the claims it makes.
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WEREWOLVES WITHIN is entertaining though it gets a little sketchy in the final 30 minutes of the movie. You can see what they are going for and it is better at the comedy than the suspense or horror element. The final scene actually is a bit deflated by the big reveal. It’s a like a not quite finished cut of a movie made from a not quite polished draft of a script but of a story that is still pretty good.
Werewolves Within is nominally (literally) based on the ubisoft game of the same title, but honestly, the name is all it shares. Like the actual party game Werewolf (or Mafia, originally – AMONG US is based on the same basic ruleset), the game is set in a pseudo-medieval village with typical characters. In the movie, it’s modern day with very quirky characters. To some extent, most murder mysteries share some element of the game, but the fun is in the dynamics of the roleplaying to figure out the mystery. Also in the game there are usually two killers(or at least more than one thus the title WEREWOLVES WITHIN not Werewolf Within) so the movie really is just a standard murder mystery. The movie RED RIDING HOOD was more like the game.
I think a straight adaptation of the game could work, but it wouldn’t be much different than a standard murder mystery in the end – just a bit more complex. Just a couple years ago there was a similar movie called BEAST WITHIN (not the 80’s one) or HUNTER’S MOON that set the scene in a videogame convention where the developers of a game based on Werewolf were being picked off by an actual werewolf. It’s a fairly straightforward mediocre but not bad horror movie similar to Werewolves Within except, sadly, it did not go for the comic angle despite the obvious set ups.
The interesting thing about Werewolves Within, and what could have been better explored, is the effect the events have on the characters. Like in the game, it brings out in an imaginary way exactly how murderous and ruthless (and easily deceived) a person can be when put in tense, stressful and life-threatening situations. The metaphorical “werewolf” within comes out of the characters, but it really takes a lot of dialogue to communicate that. The movie is definitely going the tell while showing route. It’s kind of chatty which indicates someone in the production didn’t think audiences would get it without a lot of explanation.
The history of the development of the game is actually a bit more interesting. Essentially, a psychology teacher wanted to show the social dynamics of how an informed minority can dominate an uninformed majority.
It’s actually not the first time a teaching tool became a very popular game and the history of games is pretty fascinating and revealing. Monopoly was almost certainly taken from THE LANDLORD’S GAME invented by Elizabeth Magie to teach about the unfair practices of land policy (and the alternative practice of Georgism).
The first popular board game was the Game of Life and it began because Milton Bradley, a lithographer in the mid 1800’s, had printed a warehouse full of Abraham Lincoln portraits, BUT they all were of him without his beard. By the time they were printed, Lincoln had become famous for his appearance of a stovepipe top hat and beard, so these were essentially worthless. So, he printed a checkerboard on the back and, to make it stand out from other checker boards, he put “infancy” in one corner and “happy old age” in the opposite corner. Typical happy events were written on red squares and typical misfortunes on the black. Dice at the time was considered immoral, so a “teetotum” was used – a six sided polygonal top with 1 through 6 on each flat edge.
I’ve never found an actual connection between teetotum and teetotaler, but it is ironic the connection they both have to being opposed to vice: gambling in the former and drinking in the latter.
The Game of Life was immensely popular, and really it was the Civil War that made it so unbelievably profitable. Soldiers would purchase them as there was a lot of down time between actions and the boards could be used to play not only the game of life (or the “Checkered” Game of Life as it was called originally) but also checkers or chess.
In the end, WEREWOLVES WITHIN could’ve used more of the game-solving element. The implication is that the point of the story is finding out who is the killer (or killers), but, in fact, that is not a big part of the movie even for the protagonist. I suspect the movie is a quirky independent filmmaker trying to make a movie that would appeal to a general or wider audience that could lead to bigger budgets or more lucrative directing jobs in television and movies.
It does make me want to see THE WOLF OF SNOW HOLLOW which I believe may be more independent or eccentric in its approach to similar material.
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Watching Raiders of the Lost Ark. Forty years old…
Nowadays it is titled :Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Still holds up with regards to the entertainment factor.
It is the only one of the series that still does. imho
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Nowadays it is titled :Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark.
It makes no sense because Indiana Jones is a raider of the last ark.
Arguably he’s not raiding it but seeking to protect it from the raiders. It just so happens that to do that, he has to raid it himself.
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I have a soft spot for the Last Crusade. The dynamic between Ford and Connery is irresistible. Temple of Doom seems rather problematic these days and I’m fairly certain they weren’t daft enough to make any other instalments.
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Is that before or after Indy becomes a welder?
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Re-watched the first Doctor Who story. (Considering a complete re-watch, but it’s a big committment…)
Let’s be honest, even for fans it’s a bit rubbish isn’t it? The first episode is very strong, it would definitely have hooked me if it were my first exposure to the series, and then there are three episode of complete meh.
Imagine if Twitter existed in 1963. Doctor Who would never have got past this story, it would have been dead in the water.
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PATCH ADAMS wasn’t awful, but it wasn’t good either. It really felt like it could’ve gone any number of interesting directions at any one time, but it just didn’t. Really didn’t like/understand the point of the murder either. If it was there just to lend some sadness to Patch, it was incredibly hamfisted. Coming back to what I was saying about interesting directions, having him bond with one of the kids and having the kid die rather than his love interest could’ve been more impactful, could’ve set up a stronger pathos for him and could’ve been less cheesy. Okay, maybe not the last part.
That’s what this movie felt like. A bunch of could’ves.
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Re-watched the first Doctor Who story. (Considering a complete re-watch, but it’s a big committment…)
Let’s be honest, even for fans it’s a bit rubbish isn’t it? The first episode is very strong, it would definitely have hooked me if it were my first exposure to the series, and then there are three episode of complete meh.
Imagine if Twitter existed in 1963. Doctor Who would never have got past this story, it would have been dead in the water.
They showed the first serial as part of the 50th Anniversary celebrations and I remember watching it and having a similar reaction to you here. I’ve definitely seen some scathing contemporary reviews of early Who as well.
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Let’s be honest, even for fans it’s a bit rubbish isn’t it?
Don’t you mean “It’s fine.”?
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Yeah, the caveman story is rubbish and marked step down from An Unearthly Child. It was just the first historical ready to go, IIRC. If the Daleks hadn’t been next, Doctor Who would have flopped hard.
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The show suffers in comparison to other high-budget shows, but also looks greater than it ever has?
When I was in the greatest shape I ever was, I would still suffer in comparison to John Cena.
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Re-watched the first Doctor Who story. (Considering a complete re-watch, but it’s a big committment…) Let’s be honest, even for fans it’s a bit rubbish isn’t it? The first episode is very strong, it would definitely have hooked me if it were my first exposure to the series, and then there are three episode of complete meh.
I saw it back in the 80s when my PBS station aired the Hartnell/Troughton Doctor Who stories.
That was my reaction as well. The first installment, “The Unearthly Child,” is really strong. It’s mysterious and engaging, and then the next three installments are a bunch of “ooga-oooga” cavemen. And, lord, there’s nothing more boring than a bunch of cavemen that can’t speak or meaningfully interact with characters.
Interesting point about my PBS showing the old Who stories in the 80s. I remember getting frustrated because they were skipping over episodes, and seemed to be showing them out of order. It wasn’t until about twenty years later and the series was being released on DVD that I learned that many of the episodes of that era were lost. It was really unthinkable (and still sort of is) that a content owner would intentionally junk their inventory of episodes to a classic tv series, never mind that it was still running at the time. It would be like someone at NBC/Paramount/whoever tossing out all of their Star Trek and Twilight Zone episodes either while they series were still running or shortly after they were canceled.
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There are plenty of American TV shows with missing episodes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_television_broadcast#United_States
The BBC did it because videotapes for masters were expensive, repeat rights were limited and, well, each branch of the corporation thought the other was keeping a copy, so junked theirs. There are plenty of worse reasons in that US list though.
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I had Monday off work and took the time to just sit and watch a movie that I’d never seen before; mid-80s neo-noir To live and die in LA. Starring baby Willem Dafoe and William Peterson and John Turturro, it’s a quite dark, grim tale about an uncompromising Secret Service agent who’s on the tail of a mass counterfeiter. There’s pretty much no humour (kinda rare, no?), but a fair bit of action, thrills and pathos – I’d probably watch it again. 2 thumbs up.
Being a massive GTA5 fan, a lot of the settings in the film look like bits of GTA5’s LA-inspired Los Santos; really evocative.
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To live and die in LA.
William Friedkin directed a trilogy of 1970s films (THE FRENCH CONNECTION, THE EXORCIST, SORCERER) that were unrelentingly grim, but extremely gripping and visually stunning. He stumbled a bit after that, but I thought TO LIVE AND DIE… put him back on track as an intense director who gets great performances out of his casts. Glad to know you think it still holds up after 36 years.
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Yeesh… that new MOTU show was a bit rough… the dialogues are quite bad… animation’s fine, but not as good as I was expecting.
I don’t get why it’s even a series… that shit was clearly conceived as a movie, and it has the lenght of a movie
I don’t mind the core idea of the show, but the execution is very bleh… there’s a couple of REALLY good and interesting story plot ideas, but sadly they don’t get explored that much… honestly, I would’ve prefered if they’d taken the time to do A LOT more world exploring/building with that new status quo and then build up more slowly to the main plot.
As it is, it feels rushed… or I guess like a movie, with no time to spend on the more interesting bits because they have to get to the point. There was a lot of potential with the premise, so it’s really a shame they go for something as bland and forgettable.
Also, some of the choices they went with for Teela are a bit puzzling, particularly the voice casting… SMG is not a good fit AT ALL… neither is Kevin Conroy for Merman… he sounds like Batman. Hamill is Hamill… obviously he sounds like the Joker, but it does fit the character at least. So yeah, some really good VA choices and some really strange ones.
All in all, kind of a waste as it is.
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Watched The Final Girls, a horror movie that I suppose you’d call quirky from 2015. It’s about some kids getting trapped in a cult slasher movie, so it’s very meta and all. It’s quite entertaining, but it doesn’t do as much with the setting as it could and should – the tropes it uses are only the very obvious ones – and it’s too mainstream to be gorey. Still, fun enough.
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Great show. Love it. It’s like getting a great big hug from the telly.
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Watched the Jurassic Park, BTTF and Forrest Gump episodes of the new season of The Movies That Made Us.
It’s a formulaic series in some ways but it always digs up some interesting behind-the-scenes details and anecdotes.
Watching these you wonder how any movie ever gets made.
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Watched Masters of the Universe Revelation. Didn’t hate it.
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Watched Masters of the Universe Revelation. Didn’t hate it.
I watched it earlier, my interest was piqued by how many internet dickheads who championed it when they thought it wasn’t going to be like She-Ra wound up hating it, and let’s be honest here, spite is a powerful motivator. I feel like the show had two main flaws – the design style and animation harkened back to Castevania, which is far superior; and the writing was trying very hard to evoke the corny nature of the 80s cartoon while also being a gritty sequel reboot, and it doesn’t quite work at either as a result.
Leaving that aside, it’s a decent if mostly predictable story with some interesting twists and turns, a fantastic voice cast for the most part, and a few excellent setpieces in amongst serviceable animation for the most part. Teela’s big fight in episode 4 is a standout moment on the animation front for sure.
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I’ve only watched the first episode. I liked the animation, except the CGI elements stuck out too much. The voice acting was mostly pretty good. The plot was solid but the dialogue was pretty bad. Still haven’t felt compelled to watch any more of it yet though.
The new series of Ted Lasso started on Apple TV the same day (with only one episode) and I enjoyed that. While in the app for the first time in ages, I ended up trying Mythic Quest, a sitcom by Megan Ganz, Charlie Day and Rob McElhenney about a video game developer behind totally-not-WOW. And that is a lot of fun. Ubisoft are involved, which, ew, but actually helps with the in-show realisation of the game. But the biggest thing it has going for it is that it genuinely knows what it’s talking about but remains funny in an accessible way. I really love the character of the community manager, Sue.
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I’ll stick up for the movie if no-one else will. I thought it was a great character piece with two incredibly watchable leads in Dicaprio and Pitt, and I thought Robbie was really good as that idealised version of Tate.
But more than their story I felt like it was a film that really captured an era and conveyed a very strong sense of time and place. Yes, those driving scenes are long and repetitive but I found myself getting lost in them, looking at the background details and really drinking in the atmosphere of that lost Hollywood era. It’s Tarantino’s biggest love-letter to the magic of the movies that he’s made in his career, I think. And that’s saying something given his career!
I can see how the Tate subplot would be offensive to some, but for me it was (like Inglourious Basterds) about Tarantino trying to right a historic wrong through that movie magic, however futile the gesture. Tate’s scene in the cinema earlier on really helps us to see her as embodying the innocence of that bygone Hollywood era, and by giving us the ending he did it felt like Tarantino was trying to imagine a world where that innocence wasn’t lost (as we also see happening elsewhere in the movie, like with Pitt’s subplot at the commune and Dicaprio’s career).
It’s a pushback against that real-life darkness, and in some ways a pushback against reality – you get the sense that the fake Hollywood movie-magic world is where Tarantino would rather be.
I found it a really rich and rewarding film in a way I didn’t expect from Tarantino.
And it’s also good in ways I did expect – lots of great little setpiece scenes that could almost be short plays in their own right, with cracking dialogue and some great cameos and secondary performances.
Talking about it has made me want to watch it again.
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You have definitely moved up a future re-watch, probably this Saturday.
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As usual, I’ve watched a bunch of movies and stuff.
My Robin Williams binge is coming to a close soon, I watched MOSCOW ON THE HUDSON yesterday and it was a bit of a mixed bag. It had a great deal of charm, most of it coming from Robin Williams great performance (his russian was great, and took me by complete surprise) and the chemistry between him and the rest of the cast, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was some sort of cold war propaganda piece while at the same time portraying, at least to my eyes, America as a capitalist dystopia shithole. Maybe my bias is to blame. It’s got that “pursuit of happiness” vibe to it, but it didn’t really work for me.
I think I’ve only got ONE HOUR PHOTO left before I close the book on this binge.
I’ve also watched MOTU: REVELATIONS, and I liked it. The dialogues were a bit choppy, some of the animation felt a little bit under-budgeted but the designs were good and I quite liked the story. The voice acting was great and so was the cliffhanger at the end of episode 5. I want the rest of this series NOW.
I did the annualish rewatch of the entire LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy, and it was, as it always is, wonderful. Aragorn turning around to face Gandalf, Merry and Pippin before whispering “For Frodo!” and rushing the gate of Mordor gets me every time. And the fact that the first ones to charge after him are Merry and Pippin makes it my favourite moment in the whole film series. This series is such a craft. A real treasure, and I am grateful to have it.
After that I was still in the mood for some fantasy and my recent relapse into playing Hearthstone set me up for a rewatch of WARCRAFT, which is also quite the mixed bag. It takes place before the game series, and I would very much like to see a film series detailing what happened during the games, at least the first three. As the movie goes, it just leaves me wanting more.
I also watched THE HURT LOCKER, but I was not particularly impressed with anything save for the acting.
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I am completely with Dave on Once Upon a Time, and he said it all better than I could’ve.
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I think Quentin Tarantino is sort of lost without Sally Menke.
His last three films without her — Django Unchained, Hateful Eight, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood — all seem bloated as fuck. Like they’re an hour and a half of story stretched out to three hours. Tarantino films have always been slow burners, but the last three just seem to meander around a lot. The movies she edited could move slowly, but it always seemed like there was something visually interesting going on, or tension being built, or at least some kind of forward momentum.
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I think Quentin Tarantino is sort of lost without Sally Menke
I have to agree with this. Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Jackie Brown had great, slow, introspective moments with wonderful dialogue, but had tight editing that made each film flow smoothly. I rewatched Django Unchained on cable TV recently and kept wishing I was streaming it so that I could fast forward through many bits. That should not happen with a QT film, but sadly it does.
At this point, my relationship with Tarantino’s films is that I love coming across them as I channel-surf, but I never think to myself “Gee, I think I want to sit down and stream all 2 hours and 45 minutes of Django”
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I am the complete opposite. With both Hateful Eight and Once Upon a Time, I enjoyed every minute and could’ve easily kept watching for another hour.
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I am nearing the end of the final season of The Magicians. This has become a really neat show, truly entertaining in the way that long-running light ensemble shows can become with a lot of crazy turns and ideas and good character work and jokes. Good work by all concerned.
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Transformers: War For Cybertron: Kingdom
Following on from Earthrise, the Ark and Nemesis have crashed on Earth, observed doing so by Dinobot, Megatron has the Matrix, and the final hunt for the Allspark is on!
The good news is, this is the best of the three Netflix WFC cartoons. The bad news is that isn’t a major barrier to cross. So first, the bad: There’s a lot of ponderous, portentious dialogue grated out of the Autobot and Decepticon cast through extensive vocal filters that remove almost all emotion and warmth. Also, there still isn’t a whole lot of actual transformation by the Autobots or Decepticons, and nobody without an alt mode from a prior show is getting one this time.
However, the Maximals and Predacons all transform (except for Skorponok, but he’s only in like one scene), and most of them do so a lot. Plus, their voices are either unprocessed or have a much lighter touch than the Autobots and Decepticons do, giving them a much more natural and relatable tone. Plus, the pacing is really well done compared to the other shows, escalating the action at a good rate, developing the new characters well, and having a mostly satisfactory conclusion to the saga.
At the same time, I feel that the show might be banking on fan association with Beast Wars to drive some goodwill. Am I excited at Dinobot’s prominent role here because it’s good in and of itself, or am I excited because it’s a modern (and quite fast) version of his arc from the original Beast Wars cartoon?
All in all I think if you sat through the first two series you won’t feel short-changed by this one.
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I bailed three episodes into Siege because I found it almost physically painful to watch. Is this worth bothering with coming at it from that angle?
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I bailed three episodes into Siege because I found it almost physically painful to watch. Is this worth bothering with coming at it from that angle?
Probably not, it’s the same design philosophy, and while Earth allows for different setpieces and some of them are even in the daytime, it’s still mostly in dark, moody corridors and rooms, and still has a lot of the problems of Siege. It’s just they’re not as pronounced.
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We’ve started watching Mare of Easttown after hearing good things (here and elsewhere).
The concept is one you’ve heard a million times before – damaged cop in a small close-knit town investigates a murder that draws out lots of the townsfolk’s secrets and lies – but it’s well-written and well-acted, with Kate Winslet leading a cast that also includes Evan Peters and Guy Pearce in fairly interesting roles.
A couple of episodes in so far and it feels like a decent slow-burn.
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a lot of crazy turns and ideas and good character work and jokes.
I think they were at the point where they did not care anymore and did whatever they liked. WHICH I ADORED.
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Yep, it’s really quite good!
Your posts were one of the things that convinced me to watch it in the first place!
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Watched a few scenes of Wes Craven’s A VAMPIRE IN BROOKLYN. It’s interesting in that it isn’t really a comedy. Eddie Murphy plays his Vampire character Maximillian straight so the comic elements don’t really fit. It reminds me a bit of Landis’ INNOCENT BLOOD. In fact, VAMPIRE IN BROOKLYN feels more like it should be a John Landis or Joe Dante movie and INNOCENT BLOOD feels like it should’ve been directed by Craven or Carpenter.
Like Mike Nichols’ WOLF, VAMPIRE IN BROOKLYN is one of those movies from back then that in the pitch seems obvious what it should be, but for some reason all the people in involved seemed to look at the obvious direction they should take and willfully decided they weren’t gonna do that. So we get what feels like two different movies competing with each other.
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Fast & Furious 9 or whatever they’re up to now… wow what a garbage movie. They should just stop… shit, they should’ve stopped with the last one.
They can’t hear you over the sound of all the money they’re making.
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I think they were at the point where they did not care anymore and did whatever they liked. WHICH I ADORED.
Yeah, it’s always great when a show comes to the point where they just don’t give a shit anymore and go with whatever crazy ideas they have. Agents of Shield got to that point, too.
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