Thirith on 29/9/2020 at 07:15
I was glad originally that Michael C. Hall got a big part in a series after Six Feet Under, but the more I read about Dexter and how it was developing, the more depressing it sounded. It's been a couple of times that I got to know and enjoy an actor in one of the HBO greats from roughly 2000 to 2010, and then they never found any work in material of similarly high quality.
Tocky on 1/10/2020 at 15:31
I'm glad I don't listen to anyone. Season four was they best yet. It turns out there is a deeper emotional well as far as family is concerned. And sure, as far as catching killers without getting caught, it's the same trick over and over. The killers themselves are different. And whether one trauma can cause a serial killer is debatable. The trauma he suffered was severe and the worst a three year old could. Most are indeed born with bad brain chemistry. Those are not the interesting ones though. Although he has been raised to believe that is the kind he is, he isn't. He still hasn't caught on to that and I don't think you had either, Sulfur. His need isn't to kill. That is just a means to an end in the strictest sense.
There is only so much one can do about character development in one show so that has to be strung out over several episodes and they do concentrate on Dex. Dex and his need to eliminate over and over and how that conflicts with nearly every aspect of his life is the focus. Although his trauma has flattened his emotions they are there and obvious to me. He isn't the boring self serving killer with no emotion who is more true to life. He is the compulsive fixing the same problem over and over yet never able to fix himself. The wrong label was applied to him by his father and he, along with some of those watching the show apparently, have fallen for trying to shoehorn him into it.
As far as poorly written or thinly plotted, or any of that goes, I chalk those up to eye of the beholder. People often fit into boxes. What's interesting is what hangs over.
Sulphur on 1/10/2020 at 18:38
Heh. I admire your ability to project things onto the narrative that aren't there (and really, what the show does at least half-successfully is (
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sex-dawn/201202/being-dexter-morgan) present people a mirror), but I'd wager there was far more actual meat in John Lithgow's performance than anything else. For the record, there's a multitude of different analyses on Dexter's psychological profile out there, and the fact that the only consensus between them is that he presents psychopathological traits means that either a) he's a chimeric amalgam, b) the enumerative powers of psychology (and, by extension, people) don't have standardised means to assess ambiguous, inconsistent fictional characters, or c) both.
Anyway, if you like it, you do you. I'm not here to turn someone's opinion on entertainment in any direction; I've presented my viewpoint as cogently as I've wanted to, and so have you.
Tocky on 2/10/2020 at 02:04
Well it's obvious to me anyway. No self respecting non empathetic puts that much effort into a code which isn't his. It's not the code. It's his own morality in truth. At the end of season four we see what I had suspected all along. He loves. He cares for family and not just his own. He would be laughed out of the serial killer club. No, it's like I said, he is killing his mothers killer over and over because of the trauma of being powerless to stop it originally. HE thinks he is a monster. What he is is human. He has the same emotions we all do but reacts differently by suppressing emotion and being indifferent to a sanctity of life. I don't think that's projecting because I have the opposite feeling for life (though who hasn't wanted to beat someone to death at some point). I'm pretty sure I'm reading the narrative fully and seeing what the main character cannot see about himself. I thought that was the point of how they brought the character along. I can see how the different parts of the beast were formed and fit together into a working mass. They just don't fit into the world according to the rules we agreed on. I like him though.
And yeah, we don't have to agree. When I like something nobody can turn me from it.
Ah. I thought perhaps I should read your "present people a mirror" before I signed off and it jibes with everything I was trying to say but of course more fully fleshed out and less of my wonky colloquialism as I struggle to. So you DO understand. And yes, Lithgow did an excellent job, being weird is something he does well. His character was in no way sympathetic as previously Brian had been but Dex had mistaken him for being so because he so wants another out of all humanity to relate to. He couched it as "learning from him" but we have seen him in his loneliness and know better. It all falls apart because Dex isn't like them. He is more like us. Uncomfortably so at times.
SubJeff on 2/10/2020 at 09:55
The Invisible Man
They nailed the atmosphere early on and the sound design was a big contributor. However, there are far, far to many plot holes (the phone in the attic as sure proof that something was going on, when he hits the daughter he's clearly IN the room with no way out so you could catch hold of him, etc) which was a real shame because the framework was really solid.
Mrs America continues to be great.
demagogue on 2/10/2020 at 10:52
I watched this (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiCfHW3N3vo) breakdown of Mulholland Drive, which is the first one, that I've watched anyway, that I think really captured the core of it. It's basically the analogical reading, the so-called third level meaning of the movie, after the surface & dream interpretations.
Naturally you need to watch the movie, maybe 2~3 times, and think about it before you watch this or you're depriving yourself of the experience of trying to make sense of it. I think it helps make the case why Mulholland Drive isn't just Lynch's best work, but why it's one of the best movies of the last 20 years full stop (both IMO).
Thirith on 2/10/2020 at 11:46
We finally got started on Devs and I'm definitely enjoying it so far. Alex Garland's writing and the tone he evokes often resonate with me, even if I'm not always a bug fan of how he ends his stories.
SubJeff on 2/10/2020 at 20:50
Yeah, it's definitely got better.
Harvester on 2/10/2020 at 21:11
Color Out Of Space.
Too tired after the workweek to write a long review, but man, this movie is crazy! Based on a Lovecraft short story, directed by cult director Richard Stanley (though I'd never heard of him) and starring Nicolas Cage, who I'm glad to see in something with a bit more ambition than the dreck he nowadays performs in most of the time. The supporting cast is not well-known (to me at least) but they do a good job. A meteor crashes on Cage's farm property, where they keep alpacas and milk them :laff:. Plants and animals mutate (reminded me of Annihilation), people start to act crazy, with the main character gradually becoming more unhinged, so you can see why they chose Cage. It indeed has a lot of color effects, weird/cool distortion effects and also a very interesting soundscape, though I could've done without the frequent high-pitched noise. Also some impressively gruesome body horror effects on animals and people, which reminded me of Rob Bottin's work on The Thing mixed with Cronenberg's early movies. The movie doesn't have a complex storyline but I like its kind of a hypnotic hallucinatory vibe. This is very much a modernized Lovecraft adaptation, but it does have a lot of little references to his body of work.
I'd say 7.5/10.
froghawk on 2/10/2020 at 21:16
I adore that film. I highly recommend doing a double feature and following it with Mandy.
Iirc it was actually based on the same short story as Annihilation, hence the similarities. VERY different takes on it, of course.