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I absolutely couldn't get into Nobody, it was just so blatantly a sad midlife crisis power fantasy. The whole plot basically boils down to "Protagonist is called a pussy, stumbles upon an unrelated bunch of russian mafia, and turns out to be totally a secret super badass who beats them all up". Though in fairness, the action is solidly choreographed and shot.
Perestroika fucked around with this message at 09:46 on Jan 26, 2022 |
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Jan 26, 2022 09:41
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I've been trying a few episodes of Reacher, but unfortunately ended up bouncing off of it pretty hard. Having a protagonist who is superhumanly good at just about everything and casually demolishes every obstacle with minimum effort is not automatically a bad thing, but it does need a bit of a fine touch. They also need to be decently charming, entertaining, or stylish to pull off without it feeling grating, and Reacher isn't any of those.
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Feb 8, 2022 22:19
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I'm starting to get into Wheel of Time now, too. It had a pretty slow start, but as of episode 4 I'm warming up to it. The main problem I've got with it at this point is that the blond guy has extreme Designated Protagonist Syndrome and I don't give a single poo poo about what happens to him or is rear end in a top hat friend. But at least so far he's not taking up too much time and the other plots and characters are interesting enough, so I'm hoping that'll keep up.
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Feb 14, 2022 21:32
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punk rebel ecks posted:So I want to watch something Sherlock Holmes related. I'd have to agree that Sherlock gets very dumb very quick. Instead, you might enjoy Elementary. It's not high art, but a competently done case-of-the-week procedural where everybody puts in a solid performance. It's particularly nice that Lucy Liu's Watson actually gets to do things. edit: Also just watched Kimi and had a really good time with it. The climax was just  . Not entirely sure how to feel about the whole the weirdo who's been lowkey stalking you is actually cool and your friend subplot, but the rest is good.
Perestroika fucked around with this message at 13:42 on Feb 16, 2022 |
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Feb 16, 2022 13:01
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Mr. Toodles posted:The action was weak, and she is both traumatized by a recording of a woman getting murdered and scared by a bottle breaking but is completely non-chalant about killing three people and a dude bleeding out on her couch? About Kimi: For what it's worth, that was kind of the whole point: The reason why she's so agoraphobic is because she'd been assaulted herself in the past. She's constantly terrified about that sort of thing happening again. Which is also why listening to the other assault was so triggering to her. In the end, when she's able to turn things around on her attackers, it's her overcoming that past trauma. Also, I'd argue she's less nonchalant, and more in sort of a fugue state.
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Feb 18, 2022 10:05
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Speaking of The One, I just caught Kiss Of The Dragon on Netflix and it held up better than I'd expected. There's something endearingly 90s about Jet Li carrying around a bracelet of acupuncture needles that he uses in fights to paralyze people by poking their meridians  . The final fight scene is also legitimately very good, full of little narrative moments in a way that you don't seem to see very much anymore:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlAVHzIZZvI
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Feb 23, 2022 08:50
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DeimosRising posted:The guys who come in to burn it are in hazmat suits, and they use flamethrowers. No one else is wearing hazmat suits, nor is there any indication of why they would be. The flamethrowers only light the painting, not the wooden floorboards. The logic of Equilibrium is not the logic of thinking things through I think those suits are meant to be fireproof suits rather than hazmats, which would make some more sense for people whose whole deal is burning stuff. Still a bit silly that they roll up with the whole kit while the thoroughly unprotected cleric is standing right next to them as they go on to burning.
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Feb 25, 2022 10:23
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I've watched a bit of Domina, and while it had a pretty solid start, the third episode kind of lost me. Basically it does a timeskip spanning about a decade between episodes and switch out pretty much the entire cast. I'm not too good with character names at the best of times, so having a whole set of new faces and figuring out who is supposed to be who is a lot. Also, not to be racist against white people, but most of these Roman men look the loving same.
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Mar 7, 2022 15:55
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Yeah, I enjoyed Black Crab quite a bit as well, I really liked the understated way they introduced us to the world. No great zombie apocalypse, no cackling evil villain, just a world that has gone thoroughly to poo poo and we're right in the middle of it, and much like the protagonists we're much more concerned with what's going on right now than with the past. Though I will say it dragged a little bit towards the last act, but not extremely. Also it's bleak as hell goddamn.
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Mar 21, 2022 12:56
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Gonz posted:First episode of the Halo TV series on Paramount+ just dropped. Just gave it a watch, and so far I'm... cautiously optimistic? I do like that they acknowledge and focus on showing that the USNC are very much not good guys, and generally go for a more subdued tone rather than "Big hero John Halo punches out all the evil aliens and saves the day". It's also quite faithful to the source material int terms of look and feel, so that's nice. That said, the VFX are a little bit dodgy sometimes (especially when they're placed in bright flat lighting like the desert sequence early on), and the direction of the action scenes could be tighter. But still, overall not bad at all, I'll keep watching for now.
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Mar 24, 2022 15:21
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Just caught the new Batman as well and liked it quite a bit. Arguably better than the Nolan movies, and certainly better than the Snyder one. I think the trick that made this one work is that it's a crime movie first, and a batman movie second. Riddler is framed like just a regular old (if weird) serial killer that could reasonably end up in any regular crime plot, and the whole thing feels more like a noir detective movie than a superhero movie. Batman himself is portrayed as pretty much just a guy, capable and heroic, but also fallible and a little awkward. It doesn't wank about the myth about the superhuman hero billionaire and his epic nemeses, and is better for it. It was also pretty well paced, didn't feel like it dragged despite being almost three hours long. Though I gotta say, it sure felt like the whole bomb/shooting spree subplot was somewhat awkwardly tacked on because the writers worried that the Riddler would've appeared too sympathetic otherwise. Which, in fairness, he totally would have. The guy achieved more in a couple of weeks than Batman did in two years.
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Apr 21, 2022 08:17
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Field Mousepad posted:Catwoman makes fun of him for that same line later in the movie. So it's at least a little self aware I guess I very much read the movie as intentionally portraying Batman as genuinely kind of a weirdo who hasn't really found his groove yet, and who isn't actually all that effective at crime fighting in the grand scheme of things. I felt that the whole "I am vengeance" thing is supposed to come off as a weird and bad bit of self-aggrandizing wankery, and it is also very directly refuted in the final act of the movie.
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Apr 26, 2022 11:10
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A MIRACLE posted:Glad I skipped the last season. I went back to KotH this week holy poo poo. It holds up so well dude. You can progress through the 2000s with the show it’s really interesting Even just the second to last season got tiresome. Just a never-ending circle of "The Byrdes have a hot new scheme that could get them out of this mess -> Unforeseen circumstances happen -> Oh no, now they gotta think of another hot new scheme to get them out of this mess", repeat forever.
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May 5, 2022 11:45
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Gave the first episode of that new Netflix show The Pentaverate a try, basically a comedy about an illuminaty-like secret society with the gimmick that they're genuinely nice and well-meaning. So far it seems... really bad. Perhaps Keegan-Michael Kay will manage to elevate it, but the Michael Myers parts sure are terrible.
Perestroika fucked around with this message at 19:03 on May 5, 2022 |
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May 5, 2022 18:59
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punk rebel ecks posted:Mike Myers isn’t funny. His new show is dumb. It would help if it tried to have actual jokes, during the first episode it felt like 90% of the script just boiled down to "Mike Myers doingwacky impressions", and that's really not enough to carry a show. ... then again, considering how proud they seemed to be of "kiss your own rear end in a top hat challenge", maybe more jokes wouldn't have helped it either.
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May 12, 2022 10:50
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So I started Bosch since I heard good things about it both here and elsewhere, but I gotta say after the first episode my impression is a bit mixed. The actual detective work was well done, but the opening in particular featured some pretty rancid copaganda what with the whole "hard-bitten cop who doesn't play by the rules gets unfairly hounded by the meanie IA just because he killed a guy" thing. Does it get better about that as the series goes on, or at least less in-your-face? Or is that more something you just gotta put up with to get to the good parts?
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May 21, 2022 14:06
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Wolfsheim posted:I'm currently outraged over how bad Obi Wan The Show is It's weird just how poorly much of the action is shot and edited. They had a drat parkour rooftop chase with a blaster shootout and somehow managed to make it feel limp and devoid of energy.
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Jun 2, 2022 10:51
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mcmagic posted:Fair enough. H8ful 8 was kind of a boring slog and Django was one of the funnest movies ever. Same here. Django is one of my favourite Tarantino movies (tied with KB vol. 1) just because it's so absolutely gleeful and has so much style. Hateful Eight felt downright bland by comparison. Also, finally got around to giving Goliath on prime a try. First season was extremely good, but unfortunately the second felt like a significant step down. Still decent, but it felt kind of scattershot and much less focused. Not sure if I'm gonna keep going with season 3.
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Jun 4, 2022 11:48
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Tried that Interceptor movie that Netflix threw at me and... bleh. The actual action is generally competently done, but in a lot of ways it feels like babbies' first action movie. There are no fewer than three separate dramatic countdowns that are stopped just in the nick of time, and a whole host of dramatic one-liners that just don't land. It tries to go for a feminist theme with the protagonist struggling against the deeply ingrained sexist culture in the armed forces, but that ends up feeling a little limp as in the end the moral seems to boil down to "just buckle down and Do Your Job in spite of everything they throw at you and eventually people will recognize your worth (if and when you literally prevent a genocide)". Oh, it also does the thing where the villain is 100% correct about everything in his motivations, but he also inexplicably wants to do a genocide so the audience can safely disregard what he says.
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Jun 7, 2022 08:49
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Also it shouldn't be underestimated just how convenient pirate stream sites have become by now. It used to be that pirating was a fairly complex undertaking with dead links, risk of viruses, and so on, but nowadays it's dead easy. At this point they literally have better user interface than loving Prime. 
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Jun 20, 2022 11:33
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Yeah, Castlevania really turned out surprisingly good, both in terms of writing as well as the quality in animation. Personally I'd say it peaks in season 2, but all four seasons are worth watching even if the third drags a bit.
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Jul 19, 2022 10:00
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nonathlon posted:Money Heist Korea is a peculiar beast - 50% straight from the original and the rest inspured by the new setting (North and South Korea have entered into a cooperative agreement but there's massive distrust and inequality). In some ways this adds to or fixes issues with the original and in other ways it takes away. There's a slight soap opera feel and I swear some of the cast must be from boy bands. But it's short and different enough that I'm on board. Yeah, it's very weird. In a lot of ways it's almost a 1:1 remake, in some ways quite different. It did feel quite a bit better paced than the Spanish version, though.
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Jul 21, 2022 11:31
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Google Butt posted:Warrior rocks cock Yeah, Warrior owns extremely hard. fake edit: I wrote this first thinking this was about the MMA movie with Tom Hardy, before I remembered the Kung Fu show had the same name. But that doesn't actually make a difference cause they're both great.
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Jul 22, 2022 09:36
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N-thing the sentiment that Prey is a really good time. Extremely pretty cinematography with the landscape shots, a very cool predator design that feels fitting while still introducing fun new toys, and a very nice sense of escalation and earned victories. The only real criticism I have is that a handful of the cuts in some of the fight scenes are a bit too short/quick, but not to the point where you lose track of what's going on.
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Aug 5, 2022 13:34
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feedmyleg posted:It's probably the most interesting anthology series of the past decade, but the writing in most of the ones I watched is just college student film level bad. It's a shame, because some of them have serious potential. Even with the writing, if some of them went on to be a weekly SyFy series I'd (somewhat reluctantly) watch them. Yeah, even the good ones tended to overplay their hands just by overexpositing or just going on too long, and the bad ones were outright insipid. Still, it was pretty interesting despite being uneven, and I wouldn't mind seeing more like it.
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Sep 12, 2022 19:35
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House of the Dragon is pretty solid so far, but in contrast to Rings of Power it moves at a very brisk pace, bordering on feeling rushed. Major plot points are introduced only to be resolved in the very same episode, where the original Game of Thrones would've kept something like that going as a subplot for several episodes if not an entire season.
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Sep 25, 2022 18:28
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Yeah, I was genuinely surprised by how much I enjoyed She-Hulk despite having overall rather soured on marvel stuff. I guess it's because in the low-stakes, case-of-the-week context of the show, the usual quippy MCU tone actually works in its favour instead of being a distraction. It's still extremely on the nose about what it's going for, but I guess they gotta work with the audience they got. Plus Tatiana Masalny is having a lot of fun, and some of the meta gimmicks were actually borderline clever.
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Oct 13, 2022 20:05
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Martman posted:I haven't watched it, but I got the impression that the characters not being actually connected to any legitimate Italian heritage was a big joke of the show and that it presents their lifestyles as a kind of pathetic imitation that has no place in the modern world. Yeah, that's an ongoing subtext that eventually becomes outright text when they actually fly over to Italy to meet with some mafia people from the old country, and obviously some conflicts ensue. But yeah, it can be a bit tough to watch. I eventually fell off after season 3 or thereabouts, because as entertaining as it was, you're still watching absolutely terrible people do horrible things all the time and that can just get a bit depressing after a while.
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Oct 19, 2022 11:04
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Macdeo Lurjtux posted:Theres always the classic Japanese week where the task was to make steamed buns. It was frankly incredible how across three rounds and around eight contestants, there was perhaps one dish that actually included a classic Japanese recipe/style. They literally had more dishes with an explicit US style (hamburger steamed buns) in that week than they had Japanese ones.
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Oct 23, 2022 10:14
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pseudorandom name posted:The Santa Clarita Diet is great if you like watching Timothy Olyphant have a continuous nervous breakdown trying to find Nazi baseball teams to feed to his wife Drew Barrymore. Yeah, while everyone gives a solid performance, Olyphant really was the standout in there. He's just an incredibly entertaining ball of walking manic energy. :allout:
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Nov 6, 2022 18:20
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A MIRACLE posted:i sheepishly admit that i lost interest halfway through the last season of dark and never finished it. this one might do better for me since i dont have to read subtitles lol Honestly the same thing happened for me at season two already. I guess that might've been mostly because I'd just come off Stranger Things and absolutely was not in the mood for even more 80s nostalgia baiting.
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Nov 18, 2022 12:33
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thatfuturekid posted:Timo (The Night comes for us, Headshot) has a new flick out today, "The Big 4"! The Night Comes for Us is an all time fav and I am happy that Netflix is giving him money to make these crazy, violent films. I've only gotten around to seeing part of it before being interrupted today, but it had a weird yet intriguing mix of Jackie Chan-style action comedy and their trademark hyperviolence.
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Dec 15, 2022 20:40
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Punkin Spunkin posted:I really didn't get the conclusion to Glass Onion Glass Onion ending: She didn't just blow up his house, there were two additional important factors at play: One, his house blew up because his new flagship product is faulty and dangerous. Two, this fire destroyed the loving Mona Lisa because he overrode the mandated security measures. These factors will draw the kind of scrutiny that can't just be handwaved away even if there's no immediate evidence, even before you consider testimony from Blanc and Helen. Buildings don't just explode like that, and a regular fire shouldn't have been able to touch the painting. So that's what the headlines will read the next day: "Idiot Billionaire blew up his house by using dangerous untested fuel and destroyed a priceless piece of cultural heritage". Helen blew up his entire reputation, which is ultimately the only thing his wealth really derives from. His net worth will be plummeting in a matter of days, and while he probably won't end up literally penniless, he'll no longer be unfathomably stupid rich. That's what the rest of the group realized as well. He'd no longer be their golden ticket, so with that out of the way they had nothing to lose by testifying against him and probably even had something to gain by publicly distancing themselves from him ASAP. Perestroika fucked around with this message at 14:34 on Dec 27, 2022 |
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Dec 27, 2022 12:56
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Yeah, White Lotus was simultaneously better and worse than I expected. Like, "here's a bunch of rich assholes on a vacation resort" put me off from even trying it for the longest time, but when I did start watching after all I was relieved that the show went "you're right, gently caress these people", and does deliver a few solid hits along those lines. But even with that in mind, at least season one felt like it was just kinda spinning its wheels. It's just a parade of garbage people being garbage to each other and themselves, the handful of decent people get hosed over, and then it just kinda ends without really much of a resolution.
Perestroika fucked around with this message at 14:05 on Dec 28, 2022 |
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Dec 28, 2022 13:58
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Papercut posted:You should watch season 2 Done that (White Lotus season 2), and it certainly was an improvement! It felt a lot more focused, with actual plotlines that have actual resolutions and centers some protagonists that you can actually root for. It still spends a fair amount of time on characters that couldn't bring myself to care for or about (I positively do not give a poo poo about Aubrey Plaza's character's marriage), but the signal to noise ratio felt a lot better now.
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Dec 31, 2022 11:41
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Name Change posted:s1 of the Mandalorian is probably the best Star Wars thing since 1983 Another knock against Mando: Apparently some fairly central plot points between seasons 2 and 3 happened in Boba Fett. No, Disney, I'm not interested in watching an entirely different (and apparently much worse) show just to follow this one.  On a more positive note: I finally jumpd into Severance as well, and I'm happy to report that it indeed owns bones.
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Jan 17, 2023 09:39
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Glottis posted:I would probably suggest people start with season 2, to be honest. In S1, you have to be kind of amused at how awful most of the characters are, and how insufferable they are is often the joke. Eventually you get caught up in the minor developments of their characters or lack thereof. I enjoyed it when it first came out, but I liked it more when rewatching it after S2 when I kind of knew "the deal" more. Yeah, same. Season 2 had some actual direction, plots developing, things happening, and some denouement. Season 1 by comparison just felt very aimless, just a bunch of assholes being assholes to each other no point to it.
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Jan 25, 2023 17:11
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david_a posted:I’d honestly rather they increase prices than move stuff to bullshit “FAST” channels (“free ad-supported television”) like what they’re splintering HBO Max into. Those are dead to me, absolutely will not watch under any circumstances Yeah, it's the same with Prime. "Watch for free/cheap with ads" just means "never watch" for me. I've suffered through ads for too long to ever be going back to them voluntarily. That's just daring people to go back to 
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Feb 2, 2023 12:38
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American Gods season 1 I found generally alright, just on the back of very strong and entertaining performances and a cool visual style. But season two already dropped fairly sharply, losing both key actors and switching to a much more boring aesthetic. From what I hear season 3 lost even more of the remaining good actors, so I never even tried it. Good Omens I actually enjoyed a fair bit. But yeah, it goes in hard for a very particular tone, and if you're not feeling that tone I'd expect it to just not work at all.
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Feb 6, 2023 10:19
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oh god oh gently caress posted:warrior is the realist show that's come out in the past several years Yeah, it owns. Very much a worthy (and, as far as I'm concerned, superior) spiritual successor to Banshee.
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Feb 20, 2023 16:35
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