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galagazombie posted:Is there a reason why South Korean stuff has exploded recently in the U.S? Was it really just Parasite making people aware that South Koreans make shows too? K-wave making Korean pop culture in general really popular overseas (first in other parts of Asia and now just everywhere) combined with streaming (Netflix especially) picking up a bunch of Korean shows for dirt cheap a while back and making them available globally as part of their efforts at global expansion means first a bunch of people getting mildly interested in Korean culture and then those people having limitless access to an enormous amount of Korean culture through services they already subscribe to. I know a group of friends who got really into K-dramas basically just because one of them recommended one to the others, they all watched it on Netflix and loved it, and now they're each on like their 50th K-drama. Parasite was a milestone for critical recognition and Squid Game is another milestone because it's the first big breakthrough for content that Netflix made itself rather than just buying the global rights for something made by a Korean TV channel, but neither one is a big turning point
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Oct 18, 2021 13:20
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The other thing I watched over the weekend was "Downsizing", starring Matt Damon. The premise is at least interesting: scientists discover a process to shrink people into about the size of a salt shaker, and that's hailed as a potential solution to climate change because very small people only generate very small amounts of waste, and only require very small amounts of energy (relative to full-sized humans). quote:Sidebar: to be clear, the interesting part is where they try to work through the implications of people getting shrunk down, but the part where it's supposed to solve climate change never sit right with me because it's obvious to me from the jump that that would never pan out that way. Damon's character, Paul, is living a rough life in rural Omaha, just barely getting by, when some friends of his make the leap into becoming small and he and his wife decide that they want to do it too - the scene where they get sold on the idea of moving to "Leisureville" is portrayed very much like a couple getting the sales-talk about buying a timeshare in Miami. The main draw is that along with the change in scale comes a change in lifestyle; they only have a little over 125k USD in equity, but that translates to over a million dollars when you're small, enough for them to live in a big McMansion. It even throws in a scene where an ostensibly right-wing barfly comes up to Paul as they're celebrating their last night as full-sized persons and says that persons small people should only get a tenth of the vote, because they contribute so little to society. Paul goes through this process of being shrunk-down in a long medical sequence, only to find that his wife got cold feet at the last minute, meaning he's now small but she's still big. It's an irreversible process, so he goes off to try and live in his big-rear end house all by himself, but a lot of the shine of starting over has been deflated by being left alone. The movie fast-forwards a year, and we find that the couple has now divorced, with Paul's wife getting most of the money because now he's living in a condo unit and still has to keep down a call center job when they were supposed to have been retired-for-life. He feels dejected at his life having taken the turn that it has when he was supposed to be living large. Paul has a run-in with his neighbor, played by Christophe Waltz giving a very entertaining performance as a Serb named Dusan, and ends up wasted on Dusan's living room floor after a raucous night of partying. As Paul makes his way to the bathroom, he finds one of the cleaning ladies is stealing all the pills from Dusan's medicine cabinet. He confronts her about this, but realizes that the lady is actually from a big news story that broke just after he arrived in Leisureville as a small person. Apparently, "authoritarian countries" have been using the shrinking technology as punishments for political dissidents, and there's even a clip of the BBC fearmongering about the possibility of small people crossing the US border illegally and/or using their small stature to stealthily acts of terrorism. In this case, Paul has met Ngoc Lan, a Vietnamese woman who was imprisoned by her government for political activism (apparently she protested the building of a dam over her home village), was subjected to becoming shrunk-down against her will, but then escaped, and then tried to make it to the US by sneaking inside a TV box, along with a dozen other escapees. Unfortunately, the box shifted and crushed all the over people except her, and she also lost her leg in the process. She now works in Leisureville as a cleaning lady because she has no other way of getting by. quote:Sidebar: Vietnam? Why Vietnam? I guess they didn't want to go with any of the usual suspects? At this point, Paul, who worked as a therapist in his previous life as a large person and wanted to be a doctor, notices that Ngoc Lan has a bad limp from an improperly fit prosthetic. He wants to help her the foot adjusted, so she goes with her back to her house. As they travel farther and farther away from Leisureville to head to Ngoc Lan's house, he realizes that there's an entire underclass of proletarian small people living just outside of what's supposed to be Leisureville's environs. Some enterprising slumlord parked a trailer at the edge of city limits, and what's a trailer to normal folks was converted into what looks like the small-person equivalent of the Kowloon Walled City, inhabited by Latinos and Asians and other minorities in a sort of liberal reflection on politics where the small-world just ends up replicating the large-world given enough time and a lack of change in fundamental values. There's a Mexican woman who lost her husband because they had the shrinking procedure done under-the-table and the "doctor" messed-up the procedure on the guy. Ngoc Lan is a kind soul among all these folks living hardscrabble lives, and there's a long sequence of her and Paul getting all the about-to-be-thrown-out food from the various Leisureville estates and redistributing it to the poor people in the trailer. Paul also gets to do some basic doctory-type stuff because they don't have access to healthcare either. In the background of all of this are news broadcasts talking about the increasingly worsening climate. Eventually Paul and Ngoc Lan manage to get themselves invited onto Dusan's latest trip abroad, which brings them to Norway, the site of the very first "colony" of small people, including the guy that invented the process. He brings them news about how the clathrate gun has gone off in Antarctica, and the Earth is now locked-in to a level of utterly apocalyptic climate change. Paul and Ngoc Lan, who've already bonded over the weeks they've spent helping each other, and others, end up sharing an intimate moment after hearing of the news. As they spend time in this Norwegian colony, they discover that the people there have prepared a Fallout vault - a "massive" underground complex that's supposed to let them live out the next couple millenia underground and away from all the climate change troubles, with the problems of "how do you do underground hydroponic farming?" and "how do you power an entire community of 2,000 people?" being very easily solved by the fact that everyone is small. Paul is enamored with this idea of going into the vault and being a part of a cohort of humanity that will survive extinction, but Ngoc Lan wants to go back to Leisureville and continue helping her community. Paul is insistent about this, and they separate painfully. At the last moment, Paul has a change of heart, and turns around to run out of the Vault before it closes forever. He reunites with Ngoc Lan and they kiss and make up. After that it the movie just... ends? Paul goes back to the Leisureville trailer, it's implied that he and Ngoc Lan are living together now, and he gives a plate of food to a street urchin, and he breathes a sigh of contentment. Roll credits. It's all rather abrupt. Like I said at the top, there's an interesting premise to the movie, but it never goes anywhere with it. It's just empty.
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Oct 18, 2021 13:21
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vyelkin posted:K-wave making Korean pop culture in general really popular overseas (first in other parts of Asia and now just everywhere) combined with streaming (Netflix especially) picking up a bunch of Korean shows for dirt cheap a while back and making them available globally as part of their efforts at global expansion means first a bunch of people getting mildly interested in Korean culture and then those people having limitless access to an enormous amount of Korean culture through services they already subscribe to. I know a group of friends who got really into K-dramas basically just because one of them recommended one to the others, they all watched it on Netflix and loved it, and now they're each on like their 50th K-drama. Parasite was a milestone for critical recognition and Squid Game is another milestone because it's the first big breakthrough for content that Netflix made itself rather than just buying the global rights for something made by a Korean TV channel, but neither one is a big turning point Netflix also plays a large part. Kdramas became the thing among my cohort back in India with the pandemic with things like CLOY. Its really striking given that Kpop was well known for a while but Kdramas mostly were a niche subculture thing. They still are but that niche has grown considerably larger. This goes without saying that Squid game blows everything out of the water in terms of word of mouth.
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Oct 18, 2021 13:52
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gradenko_2000 posted:Having binged the third season of "You" over the weekend, a question came to mind: the idea behind the show is that you get into Joe's head and internal monologue as a stalker; do we know that that's actually how stalkers think (insofar as it's ever possible to know how people think), or is that all fiction? i think what makes joe interesting and plausible is that he rationalizes his actions like a normal rear end person making bad decisions which is a far cry from the usual tv criminals who have their heads jammed up their asses with nonsense epic principles on a smaller scale chris delias sex pest character from the second season was spookily well done in part probably because the actual real life chris delia used similar rationalizations for his own sex pestery
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Oct 18, 2021 14:37
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The United States posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xop8yqgDMo4 i had no idea that parkour moment was coming and went out of my mind when it happened
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Oct 18, 2021 14:42
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josh04 posted:south korea is putting big money into entertainment stuff and so is experiencing a bit of a media boom i read an article somewhere about one of the scions to an industrial fortune studying in the USA and wondering why no one was interested in korean language classes. She went back and got funding for the arts in the early 00s, where the govt was picking up half the production costs, and led to the first wave of stuff like old boy, JSA, etc. The next govt (with the crazy cult president) cut all of that and then after that lady was out of office, the arts funding came back even stronger
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Oct 18, 2021 14:45
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galagazombie posted:Is there a reason why South Korean stuff has exploded recently in the U.S? Was it really just Parasite making people aware that South Koreans make shows too? parasite and squid game are both pop culture fad moments similar to gangnam style and people tend to overestimate the extent to which their being korean matters because its so unusual for anything thats not american made to pierce the broader local zeitgeist and become a fad at all note that by broader local zeitgeist i mean poo poo like water cooler stuff because going by pure numbers bts is the most popular band in the world but it remains comically undercovered in mainstream entertainment media as far as scripted stuff goes netflix has been a good distribution platform for south korean shows but prior to squid game nearly all of its successes and there have been quite a lot of them were just domestically produced dramas netflix bought the international streaming rights for and aside from kingdom no other netflix original drama has made much of a dent in the worldwide streaming numbers squid game is also the first big zeitgeist win for netflix in quite a long time with most of its number one shows being utter trash so netflix is leaning in hard on the international production angle to distinguish themselves from other streaming platforms also like parasite before it squid game is benefiting a lot from coming out during a cultural dead zone where there just isnt very much meaningful competition
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Oct 18, 2021 14:59
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RandolphCarter posted:the best comic movie is punisher war zone, maybe blade idk death of stalin
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Oct 18, 2021 15:18
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Blade 1 and 2 and its not close
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Oct 18, 2021 16:51
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Is the TV series You any good?
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Oct 18, 2021 16:59
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etalian posted:Is the TV series You any good? it’s well produced but I got through the first episode and while it wasn’t bad I felt no desire to continue watching
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Oct 18, 2021 17:11
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etalian posted:Is the TV series You any good? i don't approve of the method acting some of its actors do, but people seem to like it
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Oct 18, 2021 17:13
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etalian posted:Is the TV series You any good? Yeah, I think so. Does a pretty good job of decimating the idea of the “Nice Guy”. While the show does want you to sympathize with him (had a lovely childhood, mostly kills lovely people), it hammers home that he’s an entitled freak who puts the women he stalks on incredibly high pedestals. He’s so self-absorbed that he never realizes he fell in love with and marries the female version of himself lol
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Oct 18, 2021 17:19
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Equeen posted:Yeah, I think so. Does a pretty good job of decimating the idea of the “Nice Guy”. While the show does want you to sympathize with him (had a lovely childhood, mostly kills lovely people), it hammers home that he’s an entitled freak who puts the women he stalks on incredibly high pedestals. that's just a seinfeld plot writ large: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVDT1ARABvE
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Oct 18, 2021 17:27
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i should also emphasize in regards to korea hype that our perception of what is or isnt popular is largely defined by the mainstream entertainment press and not what people are actually watching squid game seems huge because as a prestige style project all the journalist wankers love to write about it because the capitalism allegory makes them feel like theyre doing praxis this is also basically what prestige style project actually means is just something pretentious enough that the commentariat class thinks they can like it without being called a garbage lover by their peers yet accessible enough that normal people wont call them out of touch dipshits its for this reason that the dividing line between popular stuff and stuff that actually gets written about feels so drat arbitrary you cant make sense of stuff like lin manuel miranda being considered more relevant than bts or squid game being considered more important than the gaggle of other highly watched korean dramas on netflix or marvel movies being considered better than dc movies unless you acknowledge that the main driving force behind the reception of these projects is centered around the social situation of the journalists themselves and not actual aesthetic critique or real life circumstances
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Oct 18, 2021 17:45
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the only good part about downsizing is Udo Kier is in it
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Oct 18, 2021 17:45
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Some Guy TT posted:i should also emphasize in regards to korea hype that our perception of what is or isnt popular is largely defined by the mainstream entertainment press and not what people are actually watching squid game seems huge because as a prestige style project all the journalist wankers love to write about it because the capitalism allegory makes them feel like theyre doing praxis this is also basically what prestige style project actually means is just something pretentious enough that the commentariat class thinks they can like it without being called a garbage lover by their peers yet accessible enough that normal people wont call them out of touch dipshits i largely agree, but I'm not really sure that this korea hype will last. modern media consumption is really just based on authentic or inauthentic hypebubbles. netflix or HBO releases some hot new show, it starts gaining some moment and journalists and content creators en masse decide they want a piece of the pie, and because every consumer is a constant part of this machine they dutifully obey and 'authentically' decide they want to check out this hot new piece of content. the whole internet will be buzzing about this show or film for a few weeks - people will start podcasts, some memes will enter the mainstream, some people think they're gonna make it rich by plugging into the outrage machine so they'll criticise the content for being either too or insufficiently political- but after the a new hot thing arrives people will just completely forget about whatever show they loved two months ago. it's the culture industry profiting from demand it itself creates, it's a perfect system that will last as long as people want to watch things and money is still cheap. if or when silicon valley collapses there's gonna be a whole of knock-on effects and the internet as we know it will no longer exist, but I'm still not sure if that's a likely situation. in any case, the culture industry has been incredibly effective at creating a particular kind of non-ideological ideological person, and if we want to uncancel the future silicon valley might need to go first: without a proper oppressed class that is not taught to channel its outrage into ineffective protest, things are never going to get better
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Oct 18, 2021 18:02
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gradenko_2000 posted:Having binged the third season of "You" over the weekend, a question came to mind: the idea behind the show is that you get into Joe's head and internal monologue as a stalker; do we know that that's actually how stalkers think (insofar as it's ever possible to know how people think), or is that all fiction? i liked the first 2 seasons but this one was boring best part is still his 2nd season unreliable narrator reveal where it turns out the romantic encounter that we saw was just bullshit and he orchestrated it every step of the way and he's all "well come on now, dear viewer, i'm a psycho, what did you expect"
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Oct 18, 2021 19:03
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https://variety.com/2021/tv/news/most-popular-tv-shows-highest-rated-2020-2021-season-1234980743/ Some middlebrow outlet please hire me to write about the extraordinarily popular 9-1-1 Cinematic Universe. I can probably also get a long read out about how 90 Day Fiancé is about US imperialism.
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Oct 18, 2021 19:13
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Atrocious Joe posted:https://variety.com/2021/tv/news/most-popular-tv-shows-highest-rated-2020-2021-season-1234980743/ drat the highest rated show is a 4.8?
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Oct 18, 2021 19:38
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Is the Korean mania really all that new tough? Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho have been cult directors for a while and my ex and her friends were crazy for BTS and K-dramas while being in their twenties, and that was years ago. Maybe it's just been a gradual thing.
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Oct 18, 2021 20:18
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Judakel posted:drat the highest rated show is a 4.8? these freaking millennials don’t have appointment tv!!!
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Oct 18, 2021 20:22
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YaketySass posted:Is the Korean mania really all that new tough? Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho have been cult directors for a while and my ex and her friends were crazy for BTS and K-dramas while being in their twenties, and that was years ago. Maybe it's just been a gradual thing. its only new in the sense that the mainstream press is reporting on it and doing so in such an ignorant way its not clear they remember that previous korean cultural products have also been popular and spawned their own international fan subcultures hell even the way they report on the squid game director makes it sound like he just dropped out of the sky and not that he made the most popular comedy film of the last decade thats been remade like half a dozen times in other countries
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Oct 18, 2021 20:25
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oscarthewilde posted:that's just a seinfeld plot writ large: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVDT1ARABvE lol
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Oct 18, 2021 20:27
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Judakel posted:i don't approve of the method acting some of its actors do, but people seem to like it lmfao he's played a pedophile multiple times too
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Oct 18, 2021 20:41
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poo poo POST MALONE posted:lmfao he's played a pedophile multiple times too Whom? Penn bradley? Do over and what else?
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Oct 18, 2021 20:52
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Femur posted:Whom? Penn bradley? Do over and what else? Chris Delia played a pedophile on You and also on Workaholics.
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Oct 18, 2021 20:57
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disney just backed up the new indiana jones by a year. again.
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Oct 18, 2021 23:00
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speaking of poop tv, anyone caught up on HBO’s Titans? lmao what a train wreck
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Oct 18, 2021 23:10
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i say swears online posted:disney just backed up the new indiana jones by a year. again. Disney backed up all their movies and canceled a few.
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Oct 18, 2021 23:19
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Communist Thoughts posted:Blade 1 and 2 and its not close Blade is a masterpiece and Blade II is a respectable sequel
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Oct 18, 2021 23:19
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gradenko_2000 posted:The other thing I watched over the weekend was "Downsizing", starring Matt Damon. Yeah I love it. Sometimes the jokes get a bit too obvious, but overall I really dig it.
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Oct 18, 2021 23:20
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i say swears online posted:disney just backed up the new indiana jones by a year. again. Good I hope it never comes out there's no way anyone will like the movie
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Oct 18, 2021 23:22
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I mentioned in another thread, but might as well say it here also. The second episode of Jon Stewart's new show pretty much confirms every Left criticism of Stewart. It's the worst aspects of his liberalism front and center. I have compartmentalized feelings about Stewart's legacy, and would have preferred him just accepting retirement and choosing to not mug the camera again after his surprisingly well-timed exit from The Daily Show. The timing for him to resurface now, when the 2016 election, the Trump presidency, and the 2020 election are in the rearview mirror seems to confirm Stewart's the last guy from the past I want to see now in Biden's America if he's not willing to walk back on some fundamental viewpoints. If Stewart had to come back, I was hoping his politics would at least improve a little bit since 2015. But nope... he's pretty much frozen in the Bush/Obama years. He's someone who doesn't think highly of American institutions but still idealizes American liberal democracy, and sees the rest of the world as nebulously bad. This is a big win for Team "Jon Stewart was always bad". Echo Chamber has issued a correction as of 23:56 on Oct 18, 2021 |
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Oct 18, 2021 23:54
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gradenko_2000 posted:Having binged the third season of "You" over the weekend, a question came to mind: the idea behind the show is that you get into Joe's head and internal monologue as a stalker; do we know that that's actually how stalkers think (insofar as it's ever possible to know how people think), or is that all fiction? i can never decide if this show is good or just complete trash, the third season even more so like the whole polycule plotline was excruciatingly bad but had a good payoff
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Oct 19, 2021 00:00
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MLSM posted:Blade is a masterpiece and Blade II is a respectable sequel I like blade 2 a lot more for the commentary track where its Wesley and guillermo del toro shooting the poo poo. They couldn't get the studio to let them put in a steamy sex scene with blade and the sexy vampire, so they keep talking about how they want to make Blade 3: Blade Gets Laid, and about how horny the visual fx artists are because "they can't get pussy, so they make everything look like it" to quote GDT Just saw Dune and I thought it was pretty meh. Also the more I think about it the weirder it is that there's no Arabs with speaking parts as far as I could tell, the story is about a white saviour leading space Muslims in a jihad (with wacky consequences) , its a bit late to back out now. They don't even say jihad, the cowards.
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Oct 19, 2021 00:18
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babypolis posted:i can never decide if this show is good or just complete trash, the third season even more so cant believe joe goldberg joined the dsa
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Oct 19, 2021 00:29
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Wesley Snipes was right.
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Oct 19, 2021 00:31
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MLSM posted:Blade is a masterpiece and Blade II is a respectable sequel blade trinity is redeemed by the crew having to CGI wesley's eyes because he refused to open them
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Oct 19, 2021 00:34
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Communist Thoughts posted:They don't even say jihad, the cowards. operation arrakeen freedom
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Oct 19, 2021 00:38
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