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Wolfsheim posted:I liked the finale and how things ultimately fell, but I definitely feel like the show was messy enough that a second season would have to both retcon their triumph immediately as well as over-explain some facets that I kinda hope they leave it as is. I don't think you could get a more visceral satisfactory ending than Christina's throat being horribly crushed as their guardian shoggoth triumphantly howls in the background. It's a silly movie that's gorgeous to look at. That's about it.
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Oct 22, 2020 20:37
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GoGoGadgetChris posted:Abbey Lee Kershaw is an Australian fashion model who was cast because of her resemblance to Jordan Patrick Smith. I have to imagine she was initially going to be a minor part and the 'character' was primarily portrayed by the two other actors. She was a last minute recast after Elizabeth Debicki dropped out. Which explains a lot. https://discussingfilm.net/2019/05/13/elizabeth-debicki-leaves-hbos-lovecraft-country-due-to-scheduling-conflicts-exclusive/
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Oct 22, 2020 21:50
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Open Source Idiom posted:She was a last minute recast after Elizabeth Debicki dropped out. Which explains a lot. Oh man that would have owned. She's great!
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Oct 22, 2020 21:52
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I thought christina's actress was ok, but only because I assumed her being a weirdo insectoid alien lady was on purpose
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Oct 22, 2020 22:20
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Josh Lyman posted:I saw it at a press screening and during the scene when Elle Fanning has her first modeling tryout and the fashion designer is entranced by her, someone in the audience loudly said "I don't get it!" That anecdote says more about the audience than it does the movie.
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Oct 22, 2020 23:09
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Doltos posted:I'd like people to bring up one line from Christina that makes her seem like a white feminist. She specifically didn't want to be a woman. Her whole motivation was because men were excluding her from the magic group. I don’t think she didn’t want to be a woman, she just didn’t want to be excluded. She transformed into a man to gain access where she couldn’t before.
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Oct 23, 2020 01:36
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Right. What we're disputing is the notion that a power hungry woman is by definition a feminist.
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Oct 23, 2020 01:47
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Open Source Idiom posted:She was a last minute recast after Elizabeth Debicki dropped out. Which explains a lot. This changes everything; Christina was such a flat character for me, a good performer like Debicki could have done a lot more to salvage it (or maybe there were changes to the character once they lost Debicki and had to recast with some with less experience than her?)
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Oct 23, 2020 01:53
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Maybe the character was supposed to be played differently but it came off power hungry and out of place to me. Like she was an old school villain in a show about racial inequality. The actress sucks and I guess you can probably blame that.
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Oct 23, 2020 04:05
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Bringing Dee along and then just leaving her in the woods they know are infested with shoggys was really irresponsible by the adults.
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Oct 23, 2020 04:23
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Agreed that the warlock cops would have been much more satisfying villains to have a showdown with, Christina felt like a lukewarm threat the more we learned about her. Dee crushing Christina's throat in cold blood felt kinda weird, and the beast howling at the moon seemed like an unearned "wow what a badass" moment. Dee running from the demons was my favorite sequence in the whole run, but I just didn't feel like a child executing someone in cold blood was a moment to cheer to.
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Oct 23, 2020 04:29
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I don't know how the creators intended it, but to me it did feel like something dark and disturbing, to show how Dee was changed by all the poo poo that happened to her, despite her family's efforts to save her (and because of how much they failed to protect her)
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Oct 23, 2020 06:30
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davidspackage posted:I don't know how the creators intended it, but to me it did feel like something dark and disturbing, to show how Dee was changed by all the poo poo that happened to her, despite her family's efforts to save her (and because of how much they failed to protect her) Completely agree, and I think they intended it. I was going to chime in to say I disagree with some consensus here on a couple things, but it's now it's an agreement with you and a different disagreement. At the end Dee is shown as at least completely broken and probably a villain (listen to the musical cues and look at the shoggoth, more below), and it's part of both a parallel with Atticus and the TV show's theme: people traumatized by racism often turn into monsters who take their trauma out on others, whether for racist reasons or not. The Atticus comparison: it's not a coincidence that his CO, the one telling him to execute and torture Koreans like Young-Ja , is also black. In that case it's not that they hated Koreans, just that they were the innocents the US served up as a punching bag for their rage over how they're treated at home. (Small aside: pretty sure it's never confirmed Young-Ja was killed even though dialogue assumes it. They killed to find her and did torture her, but she could be alive.) Also not a coincidence that the only other serviceman is also a disgruntled POC, Asian himself this time. You see the theme a little with her and Atticus's shoggoth. (I want to name him Station, for reasons frontpage readers may remember.) At first it looked a little bit strangely like Venom to me. Then I realized it. As someone else already pointed out, he's black, and the white people's shoggoths are white. Huh. And he's gotten better at killing than they are. Ending this darkly is the opposite of trying to provide viewers a feeling of satisfaction, but it makes the show respectable as something more than only wish-fulfillment. Though there's thankfully plenty of wish-fulfillment, particularly with all the one-dimensional mustache-twirling white villains. Except not Christina. That's what I disagree with some consensus here on. She is a three-dimensional character, especially when compared to all the other antagonists, who are just evil racist white men like Titus, her father, and Captain Lancaster, and she's even one of the most interesting on the show imo. (So much so I was puzzled and sad to see her go, apparently, at the end, but as I implied that must be necessary to turn Dee so strikingly into a villain.) She may have aspects of feminism, even white feminism, but that's mostly done with by the end of the second episode. By then thanks to her actions both manipulating and helping Atticus, she has everything, the nicest car, a mansion in Chicago, a whole magic town in New England plus her father's other assets. She's not looking for more or even to use magic to keep bending the world to her will because, as she said, her whole arc is new experiences and immortality to safely continue getting them. And look at her MO. She constantly gets things by making deals, then honoring them, even if she temporarily wavers in a huff. In fact her honor is her downfall! No revivied Leti-->no completed spell hijack. At least twice she has what she wants in front of her, and rather than use magic to take it or just grab it and run like any human could try, she bargains for it. No, she's not a simple villain. She's a sheltered child who for the first time is free but is still very much just that, a child. Look at her two or three most important scenes. The "or-three" one: shoggoth birthing scene. I remembered that just for the lore of that being where shoggoths come from in this (cows!), but it's also about her. Then there's the one where she talks with the kids playing like she's one of them, because she is. Then the big one, where she pays two whites to Emmett Till her. I must confess I still haven't decided what I think the spell she mutters before that was. Though it sounded like a mark of Cain going on, she already had the invulnerability she needed to survive it, and she couldn't have removed it like her father once did since then she really would have died. Didn't look like a painkiller spell from where I was sitting. I also don't know how far in development this was when HBO's Watchmen aired or got shown to the writers rooms at other HBO shows, but she seems heavily influenced by the arc of the TV Dr. Manhattan. LC has a bunch of similarities to that show, most of them probably coincidences. Anyway, I don't think she was lying in her earlier scene with Ruby where she said she didn't care about Till, but my interpretation is that the subtext of the conversation + this scene is that she didn't care but really wanted to care. She was apathetic but hated her apathy. She has (er, had) a lot in inner conflict, as much if not more than some of the other main characters. Two minor complaints about the last episode though. One, as I keep getting beaten to things... Chef Boyardeez Nuts posted:Oh sure, I imagine it is as simple as self identification, as in if deep down you know you are privileged then it doesn't work. On a serious note, how do you identify any race but through exclusion, drawing Black by establishing a set of not-Black? On a less serious note, an off camera plotwhere they have to give thumbs-up/thumbs-down to every horseshit race-science stratification that was in use at the time. I did wonder how a spell could bind white people from magic when "white people" don't exist. (I'm pretty sure you know what I mean with that statement.) Sure, our 500-year-old idea of race is real, but the idea itself is bullshit because race isn't immanent in our physical universe, only our constructed social reality. I figured it must be some combination of identifying as white (I was also beaten to that) and/or (don't think I was beaten to this) being identified as white by your society. On a deeper level, the level of writing or "metatext" or whatever it's called, this is probably fine because either a) both race and magic are made up, so no worries, or b) in continuity the magic requires intention, so it's all rooted in the thoughts of people, exactly where race is lurking. Probably just a quibble of mine. More seriously, the episode let me down on maybe my favorite part of the show, the real audio. Not every episode necessarily uses it, but here I assume the old-timey song played during the ritual was supposed to count. Normally they are spoken word, relevant, and supremely well chosen. Not here in my view. Oh well. Also, man I must be slow, because it took me till episode 8 to realize the spoken word bits are in fact Lovecraft Country's spells, or its version of them. OK, that's just my interpretation, but I think it works. I dig the whole John Dee/Angel language/Liber Loagaeth lore, but that's all just bullshit and windowdressing, fancy runes and all. (I never checked, did they use the "Enochian" script in the show for the runes? I should check some day.) The real audio voice-overs on the other hand have real meaning and power. There also fun as hell if you can ID them or make an educated guess about them. I like imaging what other shows could do with this or just coming up with your own. Back to loving the show in general for something: how it used Lovecraft, specifically not too or all that much, based on my admittedly limited knowledge of him. I think of LC (TV) as doing even more successfully what this funky probably-obscure JRPG called Shadow Hearts (mainly the first one) did well: start with the general Lovecraft mythos, mix in real figures, put in some wacky humor and outlandishness while staying grounded in queasiness-inducing horror (complete with the Bad End becoming canon), then take the racism out of Lovecraft, and not only that but also, perhaps by way of apology, replace the racism with deliberate multiculturalism. That might have been why Ji-ah and the unfortunate Native woman were in here, because though putting black people in it positively would be enough to gall Lovecraft, doing so while making it exclusively black would be in danger of repeating his mistakes/sins. (Back to the theme of how some people traumatized by racism can end up.) It also just didn't lean too heavily on Lovecraft because it just bypassed him to go to his own sourcebook, John Dee's delightfully crazy Angels poo poo. LC namechecks the Necronomicon as being what it is not about, and I think "Book of Names" is its own term, a good one since it has a theme about naming and empowerment (I first made the connection when Hippolyta mentioned naming that comet or whatever, but it ballooned later). However, I reckon the Book of Names is really just John Dee's Liber Loagaeth (sp?) in another form, which is what Lovecraft did with Dee with the Necronomicon. It shows up tons of places, many of which I bet forumsgoers have encountered it in. I think the first time I learned about Dee and realized it was a Doctor Who audio drama of all things. I had the great fortune to play Bloodstained a year late so it was during watching this, a good dovetailing since that namechecks Liber Loagaeth directly, but as I said, same poo poo (good poo poo!) different name. Which brings me to... Anonymous Zebra posted:Someone on Twitter just pointed out that in comic books Hippolyta is the mother and maker of Diana (aka Wonder Woman). Dee's full name is Diana Freeman. I completely agree she had to be named Diana based on the DC comics character relationships, but that still leaves open the use of her nickname. (Aside: for what it's worth, the book Lovecraft Country in the TV show is, based on Wikipedia, I think a nod to the original Lovecraft Country book, where Diana is a boy named Horace.) Even up through the last episode I cannot decide whether her nickname "Dee" is supposed to be an allusion to John Dee or not. I don't think that she used a transform potion and the time/multiverse machine to become Dee and write the book, since John Dee being a 20th century black girl/woman with a robot arm would be a bit much even for this show, but her name "Dee" could be a reference since her name "Diana" pretty much has to be. OK I wrote a lot, but I had a lot pent up after 10 episodes. Good show. Great I think. Rewards thinking about it.
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Oct 23, 2020 08:38
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I think if Young-Ja was alive Tic would have said something when accused of killing her. Instead he said he was just following orders.
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Oct 23, 2020 09:06
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Onomarchus posted:Station lol, that's going to stick in my mind. Interesting idea that magic might just no longer work for anyone who self-identifies as white, actually. It'd be hard to convince yourself you're not. edit: unless you're Rachel Dolezal davidspackage fucked around with this message at 13:07 on Oct 23, 2020 |
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Oct 23, 2020 10:55
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Did I miss something or did the show completely gloss over Yahima’s murder?
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Oct 23, 2020 15:47
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Oasx posted:Did I miss something or did the show completely gloss over Yahima’s murder? Didn't miss anything! I don't know where Yahima's story arc could've gone, but it was definitely squelched pretty fast Edit: Re vvv Yeah I don't know how well it was handled, but I understood it as Montrose does hosed up things when he's scared, and he's scared of magic. Even to a bigger extreme than Ji-Ah, the show used Yahima as a prop. Pretty unfortunate. anothergod fucked around with this message at 18:37 on Oct 23, 2020 |
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Oct 23, 2020 17:06
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When it first happened I thought there might be some information that Montrose had that we didn't that we'd find out later on. Nope, there was nothing. Montrose just straight up did an execution for literally no reason. And then they don't even get mentioned again at all. The whole plotline lasted 10 minutes and was irrelevant immediately afterwards. It really should've been left out. It made Montrose completely unsympathetic and made them trying to get me to empathize with him in Tulsa fall completely flat.
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Oct 23, 2020 18:12
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anothergod posted:Didn't miss anything! I don't know where Yahima's story arc could've gone, but it was definitely squelched pretty fast It's pretty disgusting how Montrose just kills a person, gets yelled at and a beating and nothing else happens. He murdered someone innocent in cold blood and nothing is made about it.
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Oct 24, 2020 01:59
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radlum posted:It's pretty disgusting how Montrose just kills a person, gets yelled at and a beating and nothing else happens. He murdered someone innocent in cold blood and nothing is made about it. I agree with this, the Tulsa episode was so insanely good and added so much to Montrosse, but that person he killed earlier on, like what the gently caress. Also it was lame that person he kills didn't get a chance to pop up again when they were beginning the ritual and various other spirits pop up
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Oct 24, 2020 23:06
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Yeah I would have liked a cameo from Yahima/their crew since they were the first victims of the white wizards
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Oct 25, 2020 01:27
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College Rockout posted:When it first happened I thought there might be some information that Montrose had that we didn't that we'd find out later on. Nope, there was nothing. Montrose just straight up did an execution for literally no reason. And then they don't even get mentioned again at all. The whole plotline lasted 10 minutes and was irrelevant immediately afterwards. It really should've been left out. It made Montrose completely unsympathetic and made them trying to get me to empathize with him in Tulsa fall completely flat. I think it made perfect sense for Montrose and his motivations at this point in the show. He doesn't want Tic to succeed at all in getting the book and learning magic. He knows he has to help him get to the museum because if he isn't there to be a part of it, Tic can get in over his head and die, but he is always trying to stop him from ultimate success which will just cause Tic to die from magic in some other way later on.
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Oct 26, 2020 17:20
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And Montrose was right. Tic does die to magic. He was completely justified in his fear and in his actions.
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Oct 27, 2020 05:21
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Cartoonist Kayfabe did an episode on Lovecraft Comics, figured its topical since they homage the show logo and all. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fe_ClMwg5c8
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Oct 28, 2020 19:27
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Really good horror movie just came out on netflix called His House and Wunmi Mosaku is in it. The male lead isn't that good but Ruby slaps yet again
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Nov 5, 2020 02:16
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https://twitter.com/helenlewis/status/1327576558861758467 I'm not going to read this article, I'm just going to assume this lady watched Lovecraft Country and got really upset about how they portrayed Christina
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Nov 15, 2020 21:49
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I've read the article, I still don't care about the peerage of Pedophile Island, and I still think all aristocrats should be fed into those giant shredders they use to dispose of culled livestock.quote:Carew Pole greeted me in a pale-pink sweater, with pearl earrings and swept-back hair, paired with jeans and sturdy boots. “I’m Zoom-ready on the top, and horse-ready on the bottom,” she said.
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Nov 16, 2020 18:33
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This show was fantastic start to end and this thread was a weird wreck from start-to-middle-to-tap-the-gently caress-out-is-this-loving-reddit-jfc
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Dec 1, 2020 20:24
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Guess it isn't too surprising since how long they have been silent, but looks like season 2 isn't going to happen. https://deadline.com/2021/07/lovecraft-country-canceled-no-season-2-hbo-1234785811/
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Jul 3, 2021 01:39
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That’s surprising considering how well the first season was received and it had good numbers. Sounds like HBO didn’t like the writing for the second season.
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Jul 3, 2021 01:54
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And I was having such a good day too
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Jul 3, 2021 02:32
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drat, that sucks. The first season had its flaws, but it was certainly interesting. It managed to take the book and elevate it.
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Jul 3, 2021 06:04
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It was the best show on TV in 2020.
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Jul 3, 2021 11:18
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It’s ridiculous this isn’t getting another season. Is there any way we can blame a racist?
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Jul 3, 2021 11:54
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This is all just mostly conjecture, but based on the tease of the premise the showrunner leaked, I would guess that telling a story where black people come into power and abuse it at scale was probably unpalatable to the network. Like that was a good subtheme season one, specifically that black people are just people and do the same things white people do given the opportunity, but to tease it all the way out to logical conclusions would have been to risky. A real shame, but since they did it so well season one, I'd rather see it die then just be watered down or retread in season 2. GarudaPrime fucked around with this message at 14:31 on Jul 3, 2021 |
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Jul 3, 2021 14:27
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Yeah, the map heavily implies that in a world where WASPs lost magic that American Caucasians get owned from coast to coast. Really curious to see what's up with New England in this world. https://twitter.com/MishaGreen/status/1411123731653566466
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Jul 3, 2021 16:25
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Aw man, I live in the whitelands.
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Jul 3, 2021 17:51
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JEFFERSON COMMONWEALTH REPRESENT
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Jul 3, 2021 17:52
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I would think Mexico would probably want to reclaim a lot of that land stolen by the US.
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Jul 4, 2021 06:43
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I really wanted to love this series. I love the idea of reclaiming Lovecraft, and the show often looked so gorgeous. Some of the sound track choices were awesome in the second half. Pacing was a mess though, and the structure was horrendously communicated to the audience by the advertising. God I hated the way it would randomly descend into camp, like the werewolf baying shoggoth in the finale. I can see why it would get a vote of no confidence right now. No idea what HBO's brand is gonna be moving forward. They've got to be careful not to turn into Netflix.
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Jul 4, 2021 08:11
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