Movie/TV recommendations

[Thyroid]

Episode 7 is my favourite so far. I haven't seen all episodes before (probably less than half), so I'm enjoying the hell out of it. I should be studying but I can't stop! On my fourth episode of the day.

[tegan]

Oh man, Corner Gas. The Littlest Yarbo was always my favourite one, but I'm not sure if the central joke still works outside of Canada.

[elmuerte]

I approve of Corner Gas.

[elmuerte]

Corner Gas is truely amazing. Canadian comedies really don't get enough attention. Just like "Little Mosque on the Prairie", Corner Gas is really off the radar.

[Ucantalas]

I love Corner Gas.

Although, it might just be the people I hang around with, but Corner Gas was kind of a popular thing when I was in highschool, so I've never really thought it didn't get enough attention.

[tegan]

I think it's a moderately popular Canadian thing that has more of a cult following in other countries, like The Red Green Show or Kids in the Hall or something.

 

 

Also, I was just about to suspend my Netflix subscription when I get to their website and see that they have Disney movies now. Well fuck.

[Ucantalas]

Growing up, our TV only had CBC and TVO (for most of my childhood; later on we got a satellite dish.)

The Red Green Show and Royal Canadian Air Farce were the comedies I grew up on (even if I didn't fully understand what they were talking about) along with The Simpsons.

[Ben X]

Ben, it dips in quality but it's mostly fun still.. for the later half of season 5 and season 6 it gets back on track, but it's never as good as the first two seasons.

 

Does it cheer up again? I'm 6 episodes in to S5 and it's like The Empire Strikes Back right now.

[Justin Leego]

Corner Gas is truely amazing. Canadian comedies really don't get enough attention. Just like "Little Mosque on the Prairie", Corner Gas is really off the radar.

 

Corner Gas made me feel bad for wanting it to be more like Trailer Park Boys but thanks for the Little Mosque recommendation, I'm only 6 years late to the party but liking it so far.

[Twig]

The Red Green Show

Oh geez. I used to watch that every single time I went to visit my grandparents. Grandpa loved it and so did I.

 

Damn.

[BigJKO]

Does it cheer up again? I'm 6 episodes in to S5 and it's like The Empire Strikes Back right now.

 

The actual west wing plot does not cheer up much, but the last season is about re-elections and that plotline is loads of fun, if I remember correctly.

[Ben X]

It got a little cheerier with

Bartlett holding out against the speaker by closing federal government then walking down the road to congress and then winning his...political thing

plus Christmas. But dammit, I want to see the strong, fearless administration they decided a while back they were going to be (let Bartlett be Bartlett) actually happen, seems they're all just feeling impotent and compromising and fucking things up constantly at the moment.

[BigJKO]

Yeah, that's the biggest disappointment of the series. S2's great finale promises so much but it never actually delivers in S3 or any of the following seasons.

[clyde]

I just watched Synechdoche, New York for the second time. It was even better the second time, but it still makes me feel incredibly uncomfortable in an existential way. I read the wikipedia article, it says that it was first envisioned as a horror film, but Charlie Kaufman decided to make it about things he is actually afraid of rather than monsters or killers and such.

For about a decade I was obsessed with meta-referential material and I feel like this movie does it with such skill and to such an extreme, that I can feel like that type of subject has a point plotted far enough along the spectrum, that I can just focus on the area which is in between nothing and Synechdoche, New York. I see no need to take it farther, and I can just pick out parts for specific use. 

I was reading about the scope motif in the wikipedia article and then I looked at some of my older writings and had no difficulty finding something applicable. It inspired me to consider this idea; As meta-referential content or narrative-feedback increases in ambition, it is because the author is trying to increase the work's applicability. It's so interesting, but I have a hard time expressing my interest. Man this movie is so good. It expresses the systems of expression and the esoteria of self-reflection so well. The way it shows the fear and spiraling confusion of observational-influence reminds me not to see how far the rabbit hole goes and to instead just remember that the rabbit hole exists and sometimes you can reach down in it and pull out a rabbit.

After I watched the movie, I watched the cats lick each other for a while, that relaxed me a bit. 

[Frenetic Pony]

I watched Network.

 

...

 

Wow.

 

This does not just have the best speech in all of movie history by far. It has the best THREE speeches in all of movie history by far. One two three. It's one of the smartest movies I've ever seen. Right up there with Primer. It takes all the Hollywood lowest common denominator stuff and doesn't give a shit. In fact that's what it's attacking often enough. Straight into my top ten movies of all time, and considering I've counted over 300 movies watched in my life that's pretty high.

[osmosisch]

Oh yes, Network is amazing. It's aged super well.

[Roderick]

I now have Network on my one-to-watch list.

[twmac]

On a lower brow note, I just saw 'This is the End' and 'This is 40'.

 

This is the End is a bunch of self-indulgent, unfunny crap in which they tried to make Jay Baruchel a leading character. This was a big mistake as he is so unlikable it killed any hope the film had of being good. Awful film with little to redeem it - other than an amusing cameo by Emma Watson.

 

In contrast, I really clicked with This is 40, it reminded me of my parents and how they struggled a lot with their own problems, while me and my sister generally ran around like little terrors oblivious to the bigger picture. Some very warming performances by the likes of Jon Lithgow and (!) Megan Fox help round out the film and it feels like Apatow just nailed it. The most important part is that this is a couple with a life and a family that say horrible things to each other in one moment and then are genuinely loving in the next. Maybe it is the household I am from but it pretty much nailed it in terms of my own experiences. Also, no embarrassing vomiting or shitting scene.

[TheLastBaron]

I just watched 13 Assassins and liked everything about it except the really obvious bald caps on everyone.

[Frenetic Pony]

Well that was a letdown.

 

Not Despicable Me 2. That had minions. And reminds me of the time the guy from the original husband/wife time behind illumination entertainment or whatever it is went online and ranted about how his wife was a bitch and tried to take everything just as Despicable Me was opening and... I wonder whatever happened to that? Regardless the Despicable Me 2 had minions, which were hilarious, and incidentally another Backstreet Boys joke, which is the second time that was funny after This is the End in as many weeks.

 

No, what was disappointing was Wrath of the Titans. I mean, if you pitch it to a Hollywood exec it goes: Ok, you've got Greek mythology right? A setting that has endured for thousands of years with tons of great stories and characters and wars and beautiful women and everything! Oh, and for the climax of the movie, you've got Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes as Zeus and Hades battling the Titan Kronos as a fucking five hundred foot tall lava giant! How awesome is that?

 

And you greenlight it, and give it a huge budget and all the special effects in the world, and you turn up to watch the completed movie a year later and... And, ironically considering ancient Greece was one of the only cultures in history to have its stories celebrate cleverness and ingenuity regularly, you watch a movie that makes a Michael Bay transformers flick look brainy. There's no story, there's no regard for setting, there's no... anything. I'm surprised they bothered to name the characters, for all that happened. "Oh look, it's the McGuffin of whatever, everyone in the universe now knows its name instantly! Also there's an old man being dragged into a war camp from nowhere. Obviously that's Zeus himself in the flesh, everyone knows that! Oh, you wanted people to have a vocabulary similar to one that might be used circa several hundred BC eh? Well too bad because your main character is going to talk like someone from 2011-12 when this was filmed. And your characters have to face an impassable labyrinth? Oh well, after ten minutes of action scenes the director must have gotten bored because they're out now having done nothing but stumble around for a bit." The entire movie is like this.

 

Now at least the action scenes, which is literally 70% of the entire runtime, are good right? Well there were... 2 good ones. Constituting about 15% of the movie. And then the end... how do you mess up making a battle against a five hundred foot lava giant? How do you not make that cool? And yet there are twelve year olds out there that could have made the big finale cooler than what I saw. Kronos spews a few fireballs against people we don't care about that are usually over a hundred feet away from the camera itself so we can't even see them die, then wrecks a city we never knew existed until that moment in about ten seconds from an aerial point of view so high we don't even know if anyone even lives there, and then is promptly defeated and explodes with the camera being placed like a mile away because we wouldn't want to actually get too close to the action, you know?

 

The movie was over before I knew it, thankfully for that. I amused myself by imagining how I would have filmed it instead. Thankfully there's no time wasted on plot or characters or just about anything, the only thing the movie seemed to be in a rush towards was to end itself. Oddly enough it's not the worst movie I've ever seen, not by far. It's just stupid and boring, which almost makes it a greater crime than something like Avatar: The Last Airbender, which can at least live on in infamy.

[Roderick]

I just came out of Synecdoche, New York. What a fantastic film. So loaded with ideas! It was super morose and depressing, yet I was laughing out loud so many times. It's like... the film presents itself and its drama in this weird 'well, that's life!' kind of way, skipping between years in montages. The characters feel the full brunt of their emotions and are totally believable in it, but as a viewer you're just fascinated by the bizarre spectacle on the screen.

The ever-burning house was so funny, because it defied all expectations of what this movie would be. And when the fifteen second scene at the dentist appeared in three beautifully stacking shots, I became absolutely hysterical.

I wasn't expecting this AT ALL.

[clyde]

I feel like the depressing qualities of Synechdoche, New York are easily attributed to the main character's pride (meaning the way he presents himself to himself). I think throughout the story he has some hunch that he can choose to influence that identity toward a desired end, but it would make is seem less "real" for him which is ironic since his obsession to represent his reality realistically, is constantly gnarling and distorting it.

So good. I could never dream of crafting a story that is folded so well.

[TheLastBaron]

Even though it will probably be terrible, I'm really looking forward to the first episode of «Under the Dome,» which I think aired tonight (American Night).

Just saw the first episode at a friends house and it didn't do much for me.

[Roderick]

I just can't get around to understanding what Caden is all about in Synecdoche, New York. He goes through so many crazy things.

 

I LOVE that he is Ellen, the cleaning woman, at the end of his life, and that it fits him better than the real him. Ugh, but then what does the whole Droste Effect theater set mean, and how does this fit into Caden's struggle to find love and authenticity? There's a crazy juxtaposition between slowly realizing (well, he had to be TOLD, actually) that life doesn't revolve around him, but then the entire end of the film shows everyone dead but him, and his moment of catharsis (as ELLEN) the centerpoint of existence, with god literally talking into his ear, telling him what to do. I'm laughing right now, it's all so wickedly brilliant and unfathomable!

 

Shit, the funeral scene where everyone suddenly starts acting because fake Caden told them so, and it turns out to be more truthful and gripping than any of the true Caden's realism, it's just such a weird twist of the knife. And when Olive forces him to ask for forgiveness on her deathbed by saying that he had anal sex with a guy named Eric, and then found that she couldn't, in fact, forgive him for that, and started crying, well, once again this was so sublimely absurd, that it made almost no sense as a movie plot, but so much sense as a human moment, and I couldn't stop laughing at it.

 

I really, truly don't feel the film as depressing at all. I already explained that's because I never truly felt immersed in these characters, but rather was fascinated by their transcendent misery and struggles.

[clyde]

I'm having fun talking about this movie with you Rodi.

Did you notice that the guy with Ellen in the kitchen, presumably her husband, is named Eric? I thought that was a nice touch. My thoughts on the droste effect are that Caden forms his identity, or atleast validates it through writing this play. He can examine his life and make sense of it when it is on stage. So he ends up trying to simulate it on the same scale as accurately as possible to make sense of it, but he starts realizing that observational influence is part of his life now that he is making the play so he has to include it to achieve accuracy.

When he has to confess to his daughter, I'm not sure what you mean by it not making sense in the movie plot. He's been struggling to protect her from the dangers that her mother's libertine lifestyle has exposed her to. But he fails to do so and his daughter (in the vulnerability that a child has) has taken on the paradigm of the person who he blames for her death. This perspective includes that it is largely the fault of Caden, because he did the things that he blames her mother for doing. When he realizes that the distance between them caused by decades apart (represented by the translation machine) will not allow him to change her mind, he just wants her to accept him again so he gives the false confession. Which humorously and pitifully does no good.

I think that Sammy represents how Caden presents himself and Ellen represents who Caden actually thinks he is. At a particular moment in Caden's life, when he admits something that he has denied about himself (his dependence on the love of Hazel) Sammy can no longer exist because his existence is based on Caden's denial of this. So he is replaced with Ellen who is not who Caden actually is, but who he thinks he is. I think that Ellen's husband being named "Eric" is a representation that Caden is so traumatized by the loss of his daughter that his mind must come up with a soliptic explanation, and so he begins to wonder "Did I run off with a guy named Eric to have anal sex?" This vague potential is reason for Eric's cameo.