ysbreker

Movie/TV recommendations

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Has anyone mentioned Broad City yet? Best show on TV by far, it's great, hands down, I will fight anybody who disagrees with me, I don't care how into debt I go with plane tickets.

 

 

I did!!

 

"Speaking of comedy,  BROAD CITYyyyyyyyyyy.  They are my favorite and I can watch their show endlessly.  Just bought a chromecast so I don't have to keep awkwardly plugging my computer into the television to keep up with the current season.  BROOOOADDDDD CITTYYYYY"

 

(it's buried a few pages back)

 

With everyone so ambivalent about Unbreakable Kimmy, please go watch this show.  New eps are on comedycentral.com (if you're like me and happen to have your parent's cable subscription login info), but alla season 1 is on hulu.  :D

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My almost favourites are the two older cops who are useless at their jobs.

Yeah those two guys while unimportant to the show are pretty loveable and have some good lines whenever they make an appearance.

 

It's funny a lot of what got me excited for the show was Andre Braugher doing a comedy role. I don't actually know him from anything else besides his role as House's psychiatrist in the season 6 pilot/TV movie and one other episode, but he was great in that show and I loved his acting ability and how strong he appeared against Hugh Laurie on the guy's forever deteriorating mental health. Very cool.

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So I guess they're making Frozen 2. This is very bad news for the Zeus household.

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I'm watching Unbreakable, hoping that I'll grow into it. I'm 7 episodes in and it's not happening. I like a lot of the characters, Kimmy included, but it's just not clicking with me. The whole Native American thing was a bummer of a choice, too. I'm probably gonna finish the season but I can't exactly tell you why. 

 

I actually felt a similar way about the last season of Arrested Development as some of you appear to about Parks & Rec's. I watched a few episodes of it and really felt like all the magic had gone out of the show. I didn't even end up finishing it, despite having watched and enjoyed the entire rest of the series.

 

I'm sort of posting this in the hopes that someone actually has the opposite opinion, and I'll be persuaded to pick it back up, if only for the resolution.

 

Hi, I've got a really unhelpful opinion: I enjoyed the final season of Parks and Recreation! But if you didn't like the first few episodes, you were probably right to stop there.

 

Parks was a show that became more and more about positivity in a very broad sense, and was fairly unique as a comedy that way out of its way to avoid meanness as much as possible (with one obvious but ultimately irrelevant exception, you know who). The final season felt like the logical conclusion of that trajectory, for better or worse... almost to the point of eliminating conflict from the plot entirely. It worked for me, and I enjoyed the season, but I also think comparisons to fan fiction are completely valid. It dived headfirst into the realm of unapologetic sentimentality and stayed there for most of the season, and if you didn't buy into it (I can't give a convincing argument why you should've) you'll be turned off.

 

The final episode was a bit much, even for me. There was, like, two jokes in it. 

Addendum: re-reading your post, now I can't tell if you're talking about Parks and Recreation or Arrested Development. Oh well.

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I just watched Maleficent, having heard from Bjorn and many other places that it has some interesting stuff going on. And, like Snow White And The Huntsman, it touches on certain feminist themes but unfortunately is too shallow and messy a film to do anything with them. It reminded me more than anything of the Star Wars prequels.

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Addendum: re-reading your post, now I can't tell if you're talking about Parks and Recreation or Arrested Development. Oh well.

 

Re-reading my post, it is ambiguous! I was talking about Arrested Development. I gave up on it in its last season because it just wasn't clicking with me anymore.

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Oh! Ha. Well, I liked that too, but it was longer ago so I have less to say about it.

 

And now I look like the guy who likes shitty TV everyone else was disappointed in.

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Almost done watching Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and it's been a while since I've laughed this hard at a show. I couldn't care less about the characters and storylines, but man Tina Fey can write an amazing joke. It's only the weird racial stuff and general shallowness keeping me from being a wholehearted super-fan.

I saw a Hungarian film called White God last night. It's basically Rise of the Planet of the Apes with dogs, which is way more appealing to me due to a lack of CGI and in general less nonsensical Hollywood stuff.

and kind of promises something more interesting and thoughtful (the issue of immigration in Europe is way too complex to be represented here in any meaningful way) and I was disappointed by the non-ending.

 

I don't often watch trailers or get swept up in pre-release hype, so this was a really interesting self-contained example where I first heard of the movie when I the trailer on Saturday, I got super excited, told all my friends, and then saw the movie the following Wednesday and got deflated. I felt that whole arc over the course of four days.

 

I'd still recommend it, if only because it's a logistical miracle. The dog performances are incredible. And every dog in the movie who wasn't already an actor dog was a rescue who was adopted, which is nice. Not that that placated the animal lovers in the theater who were super upset by the dog-fighting subplot.

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I want to see it (White God), but I missed it in cinemas and I there aren't even torrents of it. My only hope is probably that there'll be a Blu-Ray release.

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Oh! Ha. Well, I liked that too, but it was longer ago so I have less to say about it.

 

And now I look like the guy who likes shitty TV everyone else was disappointed in.

Hah! I really enjoyed Arrested Development's latest (last?) season. But like you its been ages so I can't say much.

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I just watched Maleficent, having heard from Bjorn and many other places that it has some interesting stuff going on. And, like Snow White And The Huntsman, it touches on certain feminist themes but unfortunately is too shallow and messy a film to do anything with them. It reminded me more than anything of the Star Wars prequels.

I've seen it twice now (the lady adores it), and I continue to be really conflicted about it. I wrote quite a bit that was spoilered in the feminism thread months ago, but I'm too lazy to find it on my phone. I think its absolutely shocking that Disney made it given some of the themes going on (rape, forced motherhood, romantic apathy and the demonization of almost all men), but maintaining certain structural elements of the original contribute to its overall messiness. I would argue that it is far from shallow though.

Edited to add: I really want to see white god, but I take it that stunning trailer doesn't deliver fully?

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Princess Kaguya is so good. It's really good. I liked it a lot. I don't really have anything else to say about it. I'm glad a Ghibli film can still make me feel this way.

 

Edit: It is always so bizarre to look up Ghibli films and see who was cast for the english dub. Like, Chloe Grace Moretz? I don't have a problem with her as an actor really, but she's so... trendy, in a way that this movie almost pointedly is not. It's just weird, yannow?

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Hah! I really enjoyed Arrested Development's latest (last?) season. But like you its been ages so I can't say much.

I enjoyed the season but it didn't feel cohesive the same way seasons 1 through 3 did. Instead of the series following the whole family, each episode tracked with a particular character. It wasn't strict so it weaved around a lot but there was always a focus on an individual or two. It made the show feel quite odd, and made it more complicated to watch since they had doubled down on the complex narrative that wasn't easy to follow at first. While the original run was always complex but in a way that meant you knew what was going on (or at least thought you did until later you discovered another layer that you'd missed before)

I enjoyed the 4th series but it felt like a different show to me.

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Hurwitz has talked about re-editing the fourth season into a chronological order, so more like classic Arrested Development in flow. I still enjoyed the 4th season and thought it was a fun experiment in comedy storytelling and an interesting solution to their problem of not being able to book all the actors at the same time. But yeah, it didn't feel like the old show.

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Princess Kaguya is so good. It's really good. I liked it a lot. I don't really have anything else to say about it. I'm glad a Ghibli film can still make me feel this way.

 

I have watched it twice and been humbled by how good it is both times. It is such a beautiful, living piece of feeling. The music is especially vivid. Then again, what movie has Takahata Isao made that hasn't been extremely affecting emotionally? I cried during Grave of the Firefiles, during Only Yesterday, during Pom Poko... Okay, kidding about the last one, but seriously, the man has a sense of gravitas that surpasses his colleague Miyazaki in a lot of ways. 

 

It is always so bizarre to look up Ghibli films and see who was cast for the english dub. Like, Chloe Grace Moretz? I don't have a problem with her as an actor really, but she's so... trendy, in a way that this movie almost pointedly is not. It's just weird, yannow?

 

That's how they always do it for feature-film dubs. I love that they turn into time capsules for what people were considered the hotness in a given year. Steamboy is the one that always comes to mind: Patrick Stewart, Anna Paquin, and Alfred Molina; but I think that Princess Mononoke is the best example: Billy Crudup (a strangely subdued presence, often nearly inaudible), Billy Bob Thornton (what is he even doing), Minnie Driver (probably the best performance, but out of place among the rest), Claire Danes (yells every single line), Jada Pinkett Smith (appears to have decided that she will just say the lines without coming up with a character first), Gillian Anderson (growls every single line, but then she's playing a wolf god), and Keith David (tries to do a Brian Blessed impersonation). It's a bizarre dub, even without them all delivering a fairly slapdash rewrite of the script by Neil Gaiman.

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RE Arrested Development Season 4:

 

I didn't really like it that much at all.  It absolutely felt like a different show, which really killed things for me.  By focusing for so long on an individual character or two, you really start to see their flaws in a much more obvious way.  At the end of each episode, I ended up not liking the characters very much because too much time was spent with them.  With the original format, cutting from one scene to another gave me just enough to be amused by the situation and antics but not enough to start being annoyed by them.  I'm not 100% sure a version cut to be in chronological order would necessarily make it better but I'd be willing to give it a shot.

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I concur with what everyone's been saying about Arrested Development S4, it TOTALLY felt like a different show. I liked the season a lot, actually, and was bummed out when the popular consensus decided it was bad. But I've thought about it, and I have to admit, it absolutely did not re-capture what was special about the first three seasons, and that's a major failure.

 

I guess for me, I figured going in that it would be impossible to produce a season that felt the same as the ones produced a decade earlier. Also, I was very receptive to formal experimentation; I (and Hurwitz, presumably) was very excited to see what kind of long form storytelling the released-all-at-once Netflix TV model could facilitate. The result was this complicated non-linear thing that takes a while to really gel, feels plotting rather than spontaneous, with the idea that it gradually comes together like a puzzle. I dug it! I think it was a mostly-successful experiment! But if people wanted a successful season of Arrested Development and not an indulgent experiment, I get that. Many of the strengths of the first three seasons were entirely absent.

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I don't mind experimentation but I think in this instance it didn't work very well.  I'm ok that they tried it, but that doesn't mean I want more of it.

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Right, I should back up a little bit and disclaim that I don't think anyone who didn't like Season 4 "just didn't get it", but rather, I'm explaining why I did like it. For me, the experiment was entertaining.

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Oh that's cool I wasn't being defensive, I was just clarifying my opinion.

 

Your turn.

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They took an ensemble show and literally shot scenes where the actors were performing in front of green screens individually so their performances could be edited together into scenes. Dumb idea. It's kind of a miracle the season didn't turn out way worse than it did. Still, that's why you have to pay famous actors well for TV shows, so they can justify taking time out of their schedule to actually perform with each other.

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They took an ensemble show and literally shot scenes where the actors were performing in front of green screens individually so their performances could be edited together into scenes. Dumb idea. It's kind of a miracle the season didn't turn out way worse than it did. Still, that's why you have to pay famous actors well for TV shows, so they can justify taking time out of their schedule to actually perform with each other.

 

I can only imagine scheduling a show like that is an absolute nightmare.  Not so much about how much they could pay them, but moreso whether there's enough time in the day to make it happen with everyone's other shows/movies/contractual obligations.

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