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Perhaps we should just have one single megathread where everything ever is discussed?

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Latest season of Doctor Who was easily one of the best. Last season was not. Although Capaldi managed to be great despite the scripts he was given. This season just shows how amazing it can be when he's given something good to work with.

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Watched Mary and Max (http://letterboxd.com/film/mary-and-max/) with my parents today, as a post-christmas breakfast movie, and it had my mom and me in tears. (My dad as well I think, but him more for the many hilarious parts than for the bittersweet ending.) This film is impressive. It is very well animated and written with so much heart and wit. It's the kind of story that leaves you with this feeling that you really should appreciate the good relationships you have more. Highly recommended.

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Latest season of Doctor Who was easily one of the best. Last season was not. Although Capaldi managed to be great despite the scripts he was given. This season just shows how amazing it can be when he's given something good to work with.

Sheesh, season 8 was the best run of NuWho to date. I haven't finished season 9, but it had two episodes back to back that didn't resonate emotionally at all (I'm talking about episode 4 and 5). The villain in episode 4 was introduced a few minutes before he was defeated,...I dunno. Season 8 was the best one of NuWho for me because of its focus on character development. In season 9, in its first 5 episodes at least, Clara is barely a character anymore, and there's not much of a development in her relationship with the Doctor. I watched episode 6 a few weeks ago, and it was alright, though not as good as its premise would have lead you to believe. It was too much of a farce for me, too reliant on comedic relief. Oh well...

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Latest season of Doctor Who was easily one of the best. Last season was not. Although Capaldi managed to be great despite the scripts he was given. This season just shows how amazing it can be when he's given something good to work with.

 

Sheesh, season 8 was the best run of NuWho to date. I haven't finished season 9, but it had two episodes back to back that didn't resonate emotionally at all (I'm talking about episode 4 and 5). The villain in episode 4 was introduced a few minutes before he was defeated,...I dunno. Season 8 was the best one of NuWho for me because of its focus on character development. In season 9, in its first 5 episodes at least, Clara is barely a character anymore, and there's not much of a development in her relationship with the Doctor. I watched episode 6 a few weeks ago, and it was alright, though not as good as its premise would have lead you to believe. It was too much of a farce for me, too reliant on comedic relief. Oh well...

 

It's interesting to see how split opinions are, the last season I really liked was 4. There were of course good episodes after that, but I felt it started going downhill with 5 and bottomed out with that stupid River Song arc (though special anti-shoutouts to the episode where they had the Doctor just straight-up gratuitously murder the already-neutralized villain because he was angry, fuck that episode and everyone involved with it).

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I found the introduction of Matt Smith as the doctor to be questionable and the show never really won me back from there. It's less about liking Tennant more, it's that the tone of that series was just not doing it for me. It seemed like the show was simultaneously trying to be more serious and more silly, neither of which worked for me.

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I found the introduction of Matt Smith as the doctor to be questionable and the show never really won me back from there. It's less about liking Tennant more, it's that the tone of that series was just not doing it for me.

 

Same, I disliked the script, not the actor. I didn't like that his first episode (or was it his second?) ended with him essentially scaring the villain away through only the power of his reputation (for a better use, see Silence in the Library where his reputation makes the villain hear him out, but doesn't just magically win the day). His reputation comes up again and again, I think Moffat is far too enamoured with the idea of the Doctor as an unstoppable badass.

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Yeah it kept coming up. Admittedly the Doctor has a long lost of achievements by then, but I liked before when he was just a man with his ship who fumbled around, knew a bit but relied more on luck on charm than anything else. Which he technically still was, but then was also treated as a bad ass superhero persona.

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It's interesting to see how split opinions are, the last season I really liked was 4.

It's interesting indeed. Season 4 is my least favorite of all the NuWho ones, though Donna is my favorite companion.

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Tennant is the worst of the new Doctors.

Believe it!

C > E > S > T

Anyway Capaldi is fucking incredible. Love it when he plays guitar. Loved the sonic sunglasses bring them back ):.

Glad Clara is finally over with, but River coming back is so dumb arghhhhhhhh. Maybe it's only for the Christmas special? I haven't seen it yet. God I hope so.

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It's interesting indeed. Season 4 is my least favorite of all the NuWho ones, though Donna is my favorite companion.

 

It wasn't my favorite season, it's just the last point before my opinion of the seasons went into the negative.

 

Having now watched the last three episodes of season 9, the third-last wasn't that interesting, and the last seemed to care far more about the characters than I did, but wow the penultimate episode was really good. It's not Blink, but it largely works on its own, and I'm enchanted with what it did. If you're at all into Doctor Who and haven't seen it, I recommend you at least go watch that episode.

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I just watched The Zygon Inversion, and I was surprised by how much I cared about what was going in that episode. That speech by Capaldi...really great stuff! I guess Season 9 is a very mixed bag overall.

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So I watched The Hateful Eight tonight.  And man, am I down on that movie.  I can't overcome how gross (and not in terms of gore, although there's plenty of that too) it is in general.  There's some elements to it that I could recognize as good, but, man, they are overshadowed in a huge way by other stuff. 

 

And here's some more text to pad out this opening so that I can keep this spoiler out of the post preview.  Need some more length here to keep this safe.

 

(Minor plot spoiler)

The plot from a very early stage in the movie focuses on a bounty hunter who has captured this woman and is taking her to collect the bounty.  The movie then uses this setup to make a running joke out of people abusing this woman.  There is hardly a moment in the film where she doesn't have a black eye, or a broken nose, or blood visibly running down her face.

 

And things go downhill from there.  This next thing is a major plot spoiler, and even the trigger warnings I want to give are kinda spoilery.  So, trigger warnings:

racism, homophobia, rape

 

There's a scene between Major Warren (Samuel L. Jackson's black, former Union soldier character) and a confederate general who has traveled to the area to make up a headstone for a son who has been missing long enough that he's surely dead.  Warren wants to kill this old man, but decides to give him a gun and try to infuriate him into drawing the gun so that Warren can gun down the old confederate and have it be "right".  And so he begins telling the general that he ran into the boy, who mentioned his confederate general father, at which point Warren starts detailing what he did to the boy.  This involves stripping the boy naked and walking him through the snowy mountains until he collapses from hypothermia, and then raping him.  It's ugly enough when it's a story being told to the general while Warren is focusing on pushing the general's buttons in terms of racism and homophobia, but Tarantino decides to add visuals of this scene while Sam Jackson's character continues to narrate.  And if you watch the 70mm version, this is the last scene before the intermission, giving you a good 10 minutes to just stew on this gross shit.

 

Ugh.

 

I think this movie is brilliant but I think it is very much an audience provocation. It's a deconstruction of Tarantino movies as much as it is a deconstruction of the west. You think "well clearly, with all these characters hating Sam Jackson and using the N word, he's going to be the hero". He isn't. 

Or "yeah, this woman is chained and beaten but she's going to have the last laugh, because in a Tarantino movie the women kick ass!" But she doesn't.

An audience wants a hero and a villain. It wants someone to root against and someone to root for. Even in the darker revisionist westerns, you always have someone much worse than your anti-hero character. Eastwood's a real son of a bitch in The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, but you never feel guilty rooting for him against Van Cleef and Wallach. Aldo Ray is a real son of a bitch in Inglorious Basterds but, come on, he's a real son of a bitch to NAZIS. Who's gonna feel bad about Nazis? Or slave-owners for that matter?

I think Tarantino recognizes the value of a good revenge narrative more than anyone, but I think with Hateful Eight he reveals the uglier side of what it brings out in an audience. You go in hoping big squibs and horrific violence and badass motherfuckers doing badass shit. But you also expect to be told that it's all ok at the end, because the people involved were ultimately righteous. Hateful Eight refuses to do that, and I think it's really fucking smart about subverting your expectations in a million ways.

Chiefly: ALRIGHT BIG FAT 70MM WESTERN IN THE INSANE ASPECT RATIO OF 2.76:1 ...that almost entirely takes place indoors, in dim natural light.

That said, I totally understand being too put off by the content to care that much why he's doing it in the first place. There are plenty of so-called explorations of the dark side of human nature and revenge that I think are just senseless and horrible. But Hateful Eight really really worked for me.

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I don't know anything about Dr Strange

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When the movie was announced I thought I should learn the characters "origin" whatever. A quick google told me he's got duff hands... They look alright to me!

Is that the actual story behind Strange? Fucks his hands up so learn magic to movie thing with his mind instead

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Is that the actual story behind Strange? Fucks his hands up so learn magic to movie thing with his mind instead

 

Basically... yes.  He used to be a very prominent surgeon but an accident messes up his hands.  He tries seeking a cure from the "Ancient One" but instead he gets trained to become the Earth's Sorcerer Supreme.

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I saw Kumiko The Treasure Hunter, about a Japanese girl who thinks the money buried under the snow in Fargo must be real, right after finishing Fargo: Season 2 (which was great!). Now I want to go back and rewatch the original Fargo to make the circle complete.

 

Kumiko is kind of an ok movie, looks real pretty occasionally, but is slowish and very lonely.

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 I'm a sucker for historical stuff anyway, but I recently watched the two seasons of The Knick back to back and came away highly impressed. One of those rare instances where everything comes together for me, great actors, directing, cinematography, amazing soundtrack by Cliff Martinez... can't recommend it enough!

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I think this movie is brilliant but I think it is very much an audience provocation. It's a deconstruction of Tarantino movies as much as it is a deconstruction of the west. You think "well clearly, with all these characters hating Sam Jackson and using the N word, he's going to be the hero". He isn't. 

Or "yeah, this woman is chained and beaten but she's going to have the last laugh, because in a Tarantino movie the women kick ass!" But she doesn't.

An audience wants a hero and a villain. It wants someone to root against and someone to root for. Even in the darker revisionist westerns, you always have someone much worse than your anti-hero character. Eastwood's a real son of a bitch in The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, but you never feel guilty rooting for him against Van Cleef and Wallach. Aldo Ray is a real son of a bitch in Inglorious Basterds but, come on, he's a real son of a bitch to NAZIS. Who's gonna feel bad about Nazis? Or slave-owners for that matter?

I think Tarantino recognizes the value of a good revenge narrative more than anyone, but I think with Hateful Eight he reveals the uglier side of what it brings out in an audience. You go in hoping big squibs and horrific violence and badass motherfuckers doing badass shit. But you also expect to be told that it's all ok at the end, because the people involved were ultimately righteous. Hateful Eight refuses to do that, and I think it's really fucking smart about subverting your expectations in a million ways.

Chiefly: ALRIGHT BIG FAT 70MM WESTERN IN THE INSANE ASPECT RATIO OF 2.76:1 ...that almost entirely takes place indoors, in dim natural light.

That said, I totally understand being too put off by the content to care that much why he's doing it in the first place. There are plenty of so-called explorations of the dark side of human nature and revenge that I think are just senseless and horrible. But Hateful Eight really really worked for me.

 

So, to generalize so I can at least provide something about Hateful Eight without spoilers, I'm thinking of giving it another watch alone at home.  Because the more I think of it, I could see this, but it's hard to argue from this angle when I was watching it with the audience I saw it with.  That audience seemed to be truly terrible, like having a bunch of people just fucking guffaw every time someone drops an N-word (which, with that movie, is often).  Maybe you're right about that movie being an audience critique, but if it was, the audience I saw it with was definitely treating it as a fun romp and that makes everything that made me feel gross feel 1000 times grosser.

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