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Glottis posted:Here's the deal with Search Party: The characters are AWFUL people, generally parodies of (younger) millennials. They are selfish as gently caress to an absurd degree, in specific ways depending on the character, each generally obsessed with their own personal journey at the expense of everyone else's. I got 3 episodes into Search Party and had to bounce. It's great and well made but I just found the characters too awful. And I've enjoyed series featuring awful people before (hello IASIP) but Search Party is something else. Maybe it's because they're so realistically awful and not comically so, it lands harder. All this talk of S5 is making me want to reattempt watching it.
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Jan 22, 2022 10:00
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precision posted:hell yeah Pump Up the Volume got added to HBO. stone classic. Awesome. It's the sort of teen / YA movie that couldn't get made today
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Feb 3, 2022 11:50
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Reacher is dumb dad-thriller TV. He and his friends casually assault people but either onlookers let it go or "they won't press charges because ...". There's gunfights and dead bodies but they just casually cover them up. Everyone gets a chance to tell their sad story about their father / wife / brother etc. Reacher regularly just recites the plot out loud so you know what's happening. And it's oddly entertaining.
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Feb 14, 2022 05:49
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smackfu posted:I know it’s for story reasons in Reacher but that amount of murders in one small town would not stay a small-town investigation. Especially when it’s most of the police force! It's hilarious how many times in Reacher someone suggests getting in the FBI / Feds / whatever and then the suggestion is dismissed, so Reacher can continue ganking random henchmen. I enjoyed Reacher, but it's a very subjective thing - it's ridiculous, it knows it's ridiculous and leans in heavily. YMMV
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Mar 7, 2022 17:28
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Enos Cabell posted:Banshee is fun, but it's super dumb and trashy. WAY more so than Reacher. My favourite Banshee moment was when the main cast are trapped in the police station under siege, cutoff from help, and one character reminds the others than this is not the first time the police station has been under siege. Because that's a thing that happens regularly in Banshee.
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Mar 7, 2022 17:33
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david_a posted:Yeah, Glow morphed from a comedy to a sappy drama. I’m not sure they were even trying to be funny by the end. So many comedies fall into that trap, thinking the audience wants to know more about the characters, introducing plot arcs. Actually, it might be easier to name those that don't become a bit soapy - Always Sunny?
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Mar 16, 2022 08:37
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Wolfsheim posted:Mr. Robot (complete series): I saw the first season back when it was new but never followed up until a friend insisted. It's tough to reconcile because to me the draw of the show is the actual hackers vs. elites plot that drives it forward, so all the stuff with Elliot's internal battle to control multiple personalities just feels like a slog. The twist in S4 is very dumb and bad, but thankfully not enough to ruin the show. I did enjoy that they never switched up doing fun experimental things like the dialogue free-episode, the corny play episode and the TV-obsessed hitman which reality bends around. It never quite reaches the highs of the acoustic Where Is My Mind? scene from S1 but it was still consistently good-to-great up through the finale. Late to the party, I'm just catching up with Mr Robot and loving it ... but I've only done seasons 1 to 3. It is a show that's not afraid to experiment with things, some great sound design and music, great cinematography. And does things that are just weird and unexplained, just to unsettle you. I'd really like to see what the creator does next. I've been trying and dropping lots of things - there's an infinite choice of series that are just okay, and start to grate after several episodes. Almost everything I've seen could lose about 20% in length and improve.
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May 5, 2022 12:21
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punk rebel ecks posted:I watched the first episode of "Blood Sisters" on Netflix. That sounds a little like a proper soap opera actually. Depends what they were aiming for. I gave the pan-African Queen Sono a go some months ago. While it's superficially a spy / action drama, there's at least as much character drama and soapy relationship drama which, combined with some very average acting, sank it for me. The idea of the globetrotting spy solving African crises was cool though.
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May 8, 2022 13:17
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Buttchocks posted:Started watching Cathedral of the Sea on Netflix, but only made it about 20 minutes. The writing is aggressively bad. It's self-parody level. Which is a shame, because the costumes and sets are great! A lot of really talented people obviously worked on this, just not the writers. I got further, maybe two episodes, and it's an interesting story but unsubtle and really violent. As in, a servant gets flayed to death and they make an extended scene out if it. And there's too many characters that are evil bastards, just because they're evil bastards.
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May 11, 2022 07:47
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Human Tornada posted:The complaint about the aliens in Signs always seemed so stupid and nitpicky to me. Human beings go to dangerous or deadly places all the time in pursuit of something, or sometimes just for the hell of it. Even just standing outside on our own planet for too long burns our skin and gives us cancer. It's not real important to the plot either. It's more about how people deal with crisis and a loss of faith, with the alien invasion as a motivating force. I like to think that Signs is what's happening off screen in Independence Day. Now, The Happening is a bad picture. Made all the more disappointing by there being a great really creepy weird picture hiding under the bad acting and direction.
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May 16, 2022 13:56
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TychoCelchuuu posted:Films have been made with intermissions. Right. It used to be a really big thing - there's a mini-climax or turning point, the curtains draw across the screen, the lights go up, everyone grabs a drink or goes to the toilet and then the second part starts. I'm not sure when and why this disappeared. I'd guess cinemas wanted to schedule more films, so there was a pressure towards reducing length.
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May 19, 2022 11:45
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veni veni veni posted:Even if someone doesn't care about LDR they owe it to themselves to at least watch Bad Traveling and Jibaro. Binged through Love Death Robots 3 in two nights. The low points are a bit like mediocre SCP entries (killer alien thing hunts down badass dudes, a plot that I swear LDR has used before) but the high points are possibly the best in the entire run, Jibaro in particular. And it's all quick so that you can forgive any problems.
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May 23, 2022 23:15
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FLIPADELPHIA posted:Gamorrah is very comparable to ZeroZeroZero, so much so that I almost mentioned it in my post but didn't think many people have seen it. They are both extremely bleak, but I like that about both shows. Same author as well. Gamorrah is a bit strange in that it comes from a bit of investigative reporting that is relentlessly bleak (the author didn't see any way for Naples to fix itself) that was made into a lightly fictionalised film, also bleak. Then a gangster series, that you could accuse of glamourizing that which the previous installments have condemned but everyone ends up badly and miserable. Romano Criminale is also good. I bounced off Suburra but might return to it - too many whiny teen actors interrupting an interesting plot about corruption in the Vatican.
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Jun 7, 2022 07:26
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A MIRACLE posted:I went through mike whites filmography after finishing white lotus and was like drat I had no idea he was so prolific. I really just knew him as the teacher in Orange County starting colin hanks, John lithgow, jack black Leslie Mann Catherine O’Hara Enlightened is a masterpiece. Just very adult, happy to be complicated and ambiguous, comfortable with being uncomfortable.
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Jun 28, 2022 13:41
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Ramrod Hotshot posted:Saw the first ep of Irma Vep and I’d much rather watch the comic book movie she promotes at the beginning of the show, that looked sick It's an odd idea, Irma Vep. Take an obscure, getting by on vibe, piece of arthouse from 20 years ago and ... turn it into a TV series? And let me be clear, I liked the movie, but it's practically the poster child for moody insubstantial French arthouse that's about nothing.
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Jul 11, 2022 16:52
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Macdeo Lurjtux posted:Giri/Haji is on Netflix, Dark is more of a mystery box show but feels like Mare of Easttown. I could make some criticisms of Giri/Haji, it nearly lost me in the middle but it's absolutely worth a look. To pick a few other random examples: * Bajo Cero / Below Zero is a movie but a lean and tense siege scenario. The Wasps Nest is more of an action film but good * Bitter Daisies is a low key investigation piece that keeps twisting. I couldn't get into the second series * Dark is really good but almost ridiculously complicated and you have to commit to the whole trip.
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Jul 15, 2022 07:43
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Late to it, but I caught up the resolutely B-grade Interceptor. And I am not recommending it, but if you wanted to watch some unashamedly clichéd ridiculous action, possibly while drinking and making fun of it? Absolutely fits the niche. I was unaware the director and story creator was Matthew Reilly, who has a long line of treekilling novels in exactly the same vein. For "fans" of his ouevre, this is a must.
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Jul 17, 2022 17:02
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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.
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Jul 21, 2022 06:06
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I miss some of things they lost but it is better paced. And some of the casting seems almost inspired - like they looked for someone with the same vibe as the original character. And, maybe it's my imagination, but the negotiator character seems a lot stronger. In the original, she's constantly fighting to be heard and having the robbers run rings around her.
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Jul 21, 2022 12:49
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Most of the way through DB Cooper: Where Are You? and it's a weird thing. It starts as your typical true crime series on a genuinely perplexing mystery. There's talking heads telling you how important and fascinating the story is, re-enactments, recaps and reactions, at least twice as long as it needs to be. It climaxes in a cringe-worthy stakeout as amateur investigators go to confront their suspect. Then it pivots into a critique of true crime fans, invokes possible collusion between an investigator and the suspect, criticises internet communities. Then veers back into someone finding supposed messages encoded into letters, allegations of CIA involvement ... It's almost a parody of true crime documentaries.
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Jul 25, 2022 20:16
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In contrast, Prime has stuck Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey on its front page, luring me in, and that is not a good film. To the point that while I'm watching it, I'm trying to explain why I don't enjoy it. It's a movie that's afraid you might start checking your phone, so it slams a new character or a plot twist onscreen every 5 minutes.
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Aug 2, 2022 07:24
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Jose Oquendo posted:It's not a good movie at all. It's two totally fine movies stuck together. It should have been a Harley & Cassandra movie OR just a BOP movie with Huntress and Montoya. The fight scenes are poo poo, which is weird given they had the John Wick people work on them. Right. Parts of it (e.g. MacGregor) belong in different and better movies where they might have room to breathe. And it feels like they didn't want Harley to actually kill anyone, so there's a huge amount of comedic knockouts. Often I wonder what the idea for a particular movie is, the pitch or the outline. And often I don't think there was one, or just one.
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Aug 2, 2022 22:58
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yoohoo posted:After Hours isn’t quite what I’m looking for. I guess I probably didn’t need the “less emphasis on horror” amendment, I just meant that I’m not looking for pure horror movies. Sci-fi horror, action horror, something horror adjacent, in an urban setting. Like it’s not a haunted house or a setting where the characters are secluded and alone - the idea of a community having to deal with a crisis if some kind, be it supernatural, an otherworldly entity, government shenanigans etc is more what I’m thinking. Coherence is a nice piece of low budget SF set in surburbia. One of those stories that sets up a simple idea and then let's the implications rip. Horror adjacent but it's in the ballpark
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Aug 10, 2022 07:26
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6 episodes deep into The Sandman and I've got fairly mixed feelings. Loose thoughts: * Dream is largely acted and visualised fine. I mean, he looks a lot of the time like he's cosplaying The Cure, but then so did the original. * It takes a while to get going. There's maybe 3 episodes of worldbuilding and infodumping and solving things with mystical powers before some more interesting smaller stories start up. The diner episode got a lot of praise but I think the following one about the immortal is much better * There's a real whiff of Dr Who in the earlier episodes, a mix of overacting and weird hyper-Englishness as mentioned upthread. SFX are passable if cheap in spots * The various gender / race / whatever swapping that's been done to the story is fine. It's occasionally distracting (if you remember the original well enough), but it doesn't break anything The original Sandman comics get away with a lot based on looks and vibes and so the TV show has a hard job turning that into a show. Mostly, I think it's a success but not a triumph.
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Aug 17, 2022 18:32
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Brocktoon posted:I declare Sandman to be “fine”, which is exactly my feeling about the comic. The height of the season is definitely Hob’s story in the second half of episode 6, which makes sense since that’s one of the best issues of the comic. I've ended up in the same place. I always thought the comic was great (or had great parts) but also had its faults that were rarely spoken of (like a lot of entries in the comic canon). The show does a creditable job and makes changes but still feels a bit like an illustration of the comic. Something that irritates me, perhaps overly, is sticking with Dream being imprisoned in 1917, which introduces distracting problems when we reach the present day, i.e. 2021. There's a lot of century-old people rolling around the story ...
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Aug 23, 2022 13:32
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Nihonniboku posted:Yeah, their reviews are a complete mess. Full of spelling and grammatical errors, and are often just beat for beat plot summaries rather than actually analyzing what they just saw. AVClub definitely turned into a completely different thing to what it was. I was an avid reader once, but the site just transformed one they started doing recaps of shows. Then it just got swallowed by shallow no-brainer articles, which are just cut and pasted for every show: * Rumor about upcoming show * Sneak preview of upcoming show * What we know about upcoming show * Recap of show * Showrunner explains show to us * 5 times that X happened in show * Why minor character in show is the best thing ever * What we guess might happen in the next season of show ... You have to give them credit for spinning so many articles out of so little substance
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Oct 14, 2022 22:42
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In the way of euro-drama TV, I'm digging Kleo - a part-time Stasi agent gets burnt by her controllers and thrown in jail, then the Berlin Wall falls and she's released and goes looking for an explanation and revenge. It's a light quirky comedy that gets a lot of mileage from trashy 80s fashion, awkward grotesque characters and the occasional well timed twist. Surprisingly fun. I enjoyed The Longest Night - an isolated psychiatric prison is put under siege by forces looking to rescue a prisoner, that the authorities are unable to give up. It does seem to just end with about an episode of unresolved plot threads, which I fear may be stretched into a whole other season.
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Oct 19, 2022 08:50
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Sock The Great posted:In the real life mystery the family never even moves into the house. They receive the first letter when renovations are ongoing, never move in because they are spooked and eventually rent it out and sell it. End of story. One of the longest reaches of "based on a true story" I can recall. Back when the real life mystery occurred and people were spouting explanations, there was one from a realtor: the family had massively overpaid for the house, was strapped for cash and was looking for a way to exit the deal. A recent NYT article looked back on the case and proposed a number of suspects but there's not a lot of evidence for any if them.
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Oct 21, 2022 08:32
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A MIRACLE posted:I’m watching peripheral, it’s already really stupid but kinda fun That was my feeling about the book: it's nonsensical but a great read. It got away with just handwaving an ending. Dunno if the TV show can do that
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Oct 27, 2022 08:54
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Starks posted:Netflix is not really hemorrhaging money. Stock price is not equal to revenues or profit, and even then those aren’t always correlated to how much they spend on new content. Their sub growth is down and their budget will probably plateau for a few years but 18 billion/year will get you a few Charlize Therons no problem. Yeah, the NETFLIX IS DYING headlines had more to do clickbait and needing something to write about, than actual business realities. Netflix is doing fine, they're just not making as much money as before.
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Oct 27, 2022 08:58
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Nihonniboku posted:All the stuff with Sandman himself was really great. But I hated almost everything in the real world. And I realized part of the problem is that they have all these English actors playing Americans, but with terrible American accents, and they filmed in England, for scenes that were supposed to take place in Florida. It feels like when English actors get dialog classes, they all learn the same slightly strange broad sound from the same vocal coach. Radio dramas are full of it. Conversely has a strange slightly artificial sense of Englishness too. It's full of country manors and lords and pubs and 'ere I'm just a cockney right. It felt like Dr Who in places.
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Nov 7, 2022 09:12
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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 I loved Dark but it's a bit of a marathon. You have to be invested in trying to follow the story because it's just too insanely complicated and humourless for casual viewing.
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Nov 18, 2022 13:37
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Jerkface posted:Making the rebellion way more grungier and alive than in ANH adds a ton more imagination to the world, like all the people listening at their little stations on Yavin for things like communications from operatives like Cass. Very cool. Right. Rogue One is the first time the rebellion looks like a rebellion. Rather than a group of space dilettantes having a fight with their HOA. And this doesn't mean the tone of original Star Wars is wrong or bad. But it's very broad, like a kids film or old time drama. Rebellion good, Empire bad, let's get on with the plot. Rogue One is like another take on that world - what might it actually be like? Away from the heroes and generals and politicians, what's it like on the ground? When Alderaan is destroyed in ANH, it doesn't really land that millions of people died, they're more worried about the impact on the heroes. In Rogue One, you see the Rebellion has a cost. There's things in RO that could be better. It feels a bit stuffed with quirky characters for no other reason than to have quirky characters. I didn't find Jyn a very compelling protagonist, she largely just plays the role she has to. But overall, I liked it a lot.
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Nov 25, 2022 15:43
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Medullah posted:Troll is basically a Godzilla/Kong script with Norwegian flavor. I enjoyed it but it wasn't anything groundbreaking It's fine but no Trollhunter. And it does flipflop a lot in the monster characterization.
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Dec 4, 2022 18:51
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Sir Kodiak posted:Don't know if I missed some of the subtitles or what, but did anyone else have an issue following what people were trying to accomplish in the Netflix Troll? For instance, the scene where they confront the troll with bells hanging from helicopters. You'd think they'd be used to drive it away from population centers, but instead they completely surround it at close range. What was their picture of that going well? No, it's definitely underwritten. They just forget about the bells. And why not just play the sound of bells on speakers?The kings assistant just waits for someone to show up and ask him.about trolls. Then he really doesn't have a solution. Why did they trap the troll king up country? And the UV lamp trap at the end is like the bells - what's the endgame?, You could probably explain away most of these questions but there's a lot of them
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Dec 4, 2022 19:01
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Grandpa Palpatine posted:how is Tales from the Loop? Your scepticism is warranted but it's good. It's like a melancholic version of the Twilight Zone, except all the stories take place in the one location and all interlink lightly, while standing alone. Some might find it a bit too downbeat. I'd love to see a second series. Maybe the artbook was just an excuse for someone making a show they always wanted to.
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Dec 26, 2022 22:12
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veni veni veni posted:I felt mixed on Glass Onion just like I did Knives out. Fun, probably too long, but kind of bs as a mystery. It creates mystery by omitting a bunch of information and then feeding it to you in an info dump at the end. There’s no fun in guessing cause it doesn’t tell you what you need to know to begin with. Also I know I’m supposed to love the performances but imo a lot of them are corny and not great. More or less how I felt. I won't say they're bad films, but I found them entertaining but little more. And typical of "mysteries" that just pull some convuluted solution out of the air, proclaiming it as only logical solution. When I first started to read mystery and crime fiction, I was surprised how common that is as a solution, even in Agatha Christy - holding back information, some cheap pop psychology then a crazy complicated explanation are accepted plots. However I did appreciate Benoit's first solution, solving the setup "murder". And Janelle Monae is charming as hell. And the absurd machinations of the plot are part of the attraction. So, I prefer the comedy / hijinks of Glass Onion to the straight take of Knives Out.
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Dec 28, 2022 16:06
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Rental Sting posted:This is exactly true. Book was just alright. Show was great. Recently read Emily St. Mandel's latest novel Sea of Tranquility due to the rapturous praise it's gotten and its lukewarm literary fiction crossed with very half-assed science fiction. Book critics are insane. SF fans have long and rightly grumbled about how when a literary author does science fiction, it's inevitably praised for its invention and imagination, while plundering a century of tropes. Not that the SF community doesn't have abysmal taste but ...
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Dec 29, 2022 12:25
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Nihonniboku posted:Watching it, I was thinking about how both he and Anya Taylor Joy have pretty convincing American accents, when so many British actors often struggle with the American rhotic R. I wonder if that has something to do with the fact that they weren't trained in Shakespearean drama? There's definitely a standard British actor take at an American accent, that you hear in endless UK TV and radio dramas. I figure it must be taught somewhere it's so ubiquitous. Perhaps Joy and Fiennes missed it because they didn't do that low-end drama schooling? On other matters, so enjoying Money Heist Korea. It's such an oddity, taking 80% of the script for Casa de Papel and making something that feels so different and in some ways better.
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Jan 4, 2023 18:21
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precision posted:I haven't watched 1899 yet but Google says that Grace Slick did the music?? They use a lot of modern music in dramatic moments, especially White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane.
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Jan 7, 2023 10:29
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