SubJeff on 3/4/2020 at 13:29
So it was my bad - The Mandalorian is being released slowly in the UK. Welp, looks like Disney got me...
Renault on 3/4/2020 at 14:59
Wife and I are watching Better Call Saul. I think Vince Gilligan has the golden touch. Never thought this show would equal the quality of Breaking Bad, but here we are. And my wife actually likes it even better, as at least (so far) there's far less violence.
Tocky on 5/4/2020 at 01:50
My sister has been after me forever to see Outlander. I owe her. She taught me to read before I entered school. Nevertheless I resisted. The wife and I would visit and go antiqueing then take her out to eat. Since my brother in law died of Huntingtons disease we have felt it our duty to visit and keep up her spirits. She knew and offered material in line with my interest in history. Often she has given me books on such. She knows I like authors such as Bernard Cornwell who use real history in storied accounts. As I say, she kept after me. In such she sent the first season of Outlander to us on CD. It wasn't as bad as I thought.
Oh yes it was from a female perspective. It was as much a Machiavellian account of the Jacobite rebellion as one would expect. That isn't as bad thing as one might expect. The last of the defense of king James was an interesting point in history. It was also the end of clans in Scotland. Having ancestors aligned with clan McDonald, I had no dog in this hunt, except as it ended the clans forever. This was better than I expected. I understood it would be once I let go my prejudice.
I have enjoyed it. Yes it was a women's series. It had all the hallmarks of one in that it is about personal relationships. But it is quite interesting in it's recounting of historical events. After viewing it I cannot fault it in it's accuracy. Damned if I don't enjoy this take on it. My sister was right. However the shear amount of sex in this will make it difficult to look her in the eyes when I tell her how much I enjoyed it.
SubJeff on 5/4/2020 at 21:08
Yeaaah, Outlander was a no from me.
I just wanted Long Shot. Good fun, with some good laughs. But then I like Seth Rogan so....
Gryzemuis on 6/4/2020 at 00:39
I watched "El Hoyo".
Translated in English: "The Platform". But it translates from Spanish as "The Hole".
Movie from 2019. 94 Minutes. Available on Netflix. Spanish spoken (as usual, don't watch synchronized movies, if the original language with subtitles is available).
Don't know what to say about it.
Except it's a bit different from most movies.
I don't want to spoil anything. If you are interested, just watch it. Don't read about it. Anything. Until you've seen the movie.
If you don't like it, it'll be obvious within 20-30 minutes. You can stop then, if you don't like it.
I think it's worth watching.
rachel on 15/4/2020 at 12:08
Quote Posted by Gryzemuis
I watched "El Hoyo".
Translated in English: "
The Platform". But it translates from Spanish as "The Hole".
Movie from 2019. 94 Minutes. Available on Netflix. Spanish spoken (as usual, don't watch synchronized movies, if the original language with subtitles is available).
Don't know what to say about it.
Except it's a bit different from most movies.
I don't want to spoil anything. If you are interested, just watch it. Don't read about it. Anything. Until you've seen the movie.
If you don't like it, it'll be obvious within 20-30 minutes. You can stop then, if you don't like it.
I think it's worth watching.
I was extremely disappointed by this one. I'm really tired of lazy writing that hides its ineptitude at finding resolution behind style and aesthetics. There are movies that are open to interpretation because they're built that way with a rich underlying current of characterization and plot, and there are movies that are open to interpretation because they literally stop and leave the whole thing unfinished.
Paradoxically, it's also way longer than it should. I argued with colleagues that if you made it 20 minutes shorter it would make a very decent Black Mirror episode. Characters repeat themselves ad nauseam to make obvious points, which only adds to the frustration when the ending comes out as a cop out.
Worth watching... until the last 2 minutes.
It's too bad because the concept itself was fantastic and they could really have gone to town with this.
Gryzemuis on 15/4/2020 at 17:32
I'm sorry if you didn't like it in the end. I understand what you're saying. I thought it was an interesting movie, although it feels it could have been made better. (Indeed, by e.g. making it shorter. Or changing the end. Or something).
Yesterday I watched "Vivarium" (2019). I didn't like it. The basis for the story is one simple idea. And for the rest there isn't really a story. I can't remember why I decided to watch Vivarium (someone must have recommended it to me, I guess). So I wasn't disappointed. But if you don't watch this one, you won't miss anything.
2-3 Weeks ago I started watching "The Man in the High Castle". TV show on Amazon Prime. 4 Seasons of 10 episodes each. Based on the novel TMITHC by Philip K Dick. So I thought this might be good. Unfortunately, no. I watch 15 episodes, and decided to stop watching it. The base story element on which everything is built is good ("what if ..."). But for the rest I didn't like it much. No scifi elements. No surprises, no twists. I found the characters uninteresting (the good guys and the bad guys). I didn't care about the characters (during view I was basically cheering: "go on then, throw a nuclear bomb on the whole lot !"). TMITHC was a bit disappointing for me.
SubJeff on 15/4/2020 at 22:39
Me too. I watched until the last episode of Season 1 I think, and just couldn't be bothered to finish it.
demagogue on 19/4/2020 at 11:28
So I just finished off Devs. It's a one-off 8 episode series. It wildly exceeded my expectations, and I actually don't want to say too much because it's good to come into it without any preconceptions. I thought it was going to be like that old techy show Eureka, where some hi-tech lab comes up with interesting gizmos and they play around with reality. But this was on a higher plane than that, bordering on the spiritual, in both the mind-expanding and the disorienting off-putting sides of that term.
Probably the best element of it was the music and sound design, which were pretty amazing in evoking the otherworldliness and cosmic scale of it. The Nick Offerman character is pitch perfect. I've been reading people saying that he's playing against type, but he still has the same fiercely independent streak as Ron Swanson. The main character is kind of wooden, like a grown up 11. In a normal show that'd be a problem, but this show brings little nuances up to a cosmic level, so her underacting and the smallness of her character actually kind of work here. The story was not what I was expecting, but anyway playing with ideas that are fun to think about, and for the most part it holds all the way through. Highly recommended.
Sulphur on 19/4/2020 at 13:00
Iunno. Devs went exactly where I was expecting it to, which is unexpected when it comes to an Alex Garland joint. The audience wants a certain outcome when it comes to the problem of determinism and free will, and while the show makes a good amount of noise about reality not being what you want it to be, in the end its ultimate failure is not giving each interpretation equal weight, no matter the soliloquies from its pro/antagonists. I think the point where you knew exactly where it was headed was the episode with multiple versions of events playing out simultaneously in the intro. Lovely set of sequences to behold visually, but the irony of that creative choice was that everything narrowed down to an inevitable conclusion. And that removed the richness of thematic resonance. Also, quoting Larkin, then Yeats - not so much on the nose as it is thumping the nose with a ball-peen hammer.
Which means the bits to focus on are the acting and the directing. And you know, there's no real wrong notes in the acting or the cinematography. It's shot well, there's dabbling with arthouse framing, Ron Swanson with long hair is a hoot. And yet, and it's good that you mentioned underacting -- the main players feature this odd, affect-less detachment that I find distracting. Rational people behave irrationally in certain situations, but outside of Katie's probable sociopathy, there's this sense that the other characters just aren't particularly human. Lily's confusion and coldness are at odds with each other, Katie's sudden burst of emotion in the last episode is at odds with everything we've seen about her for seven episodes, and Forest -- for someone apparently driven by tragedy, he's oddly detached when he's not imploding. It's also something that bothered me about Ex Machina, but at least there it made sense in context.
So there are some missteps, but it's an interesting story about reality with the requisite amount of surface-level collegiate philosophical meandering. I'd say I wanted there to be more to it, but I'd also have to think about what you actually can do within this framework that affords deeper insight. And maybe I will at that. That aside, I'd say it's all right, all in all. A solid 6.5/10. It doesn't leverage the strengths of TV, so they could have made it a punchy movie instead, with all the flab cut out.
What tickles me though is that we're living in a time where we have two (three if you count the mediocrity that is Dark) high budget TV shows about determinism competing with each other. Westworld seems to be headed towards the same conclusion as Devs, but it's having slightly more fun doing that.