ysbreker

Movie/TV recommendations

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7 hours ago, twmac said:

Just watched the new Dave Chapelle special and, man is it rough.

 

It starts off well and then struggles entirely.

 

There is a 13-15 minute bit where he fumbles transgender rights and he keeps hinting at his own ignorance and toying with it before just making transgender people the punchline. He then, almost, ends it  on a rape joke that could have been really interesting and ended up just feeling like a Cosby apology. His anecdotes on meeting OJ Simpson were good as it gives an insight into the shifting sands of fame and infamy.

 

I truly cannot recommend it to anyone.

 

We have pretty similar thoughts on this - I think the whole trans punchline was fucking gross.I don't think I'm going to watch any of the other specials, I had a handful of chuckles but man this first special left a pretty bad taste in my mouth.  

 

I think a lot of the issue is that most of his LGBTQ material is lazy and just plays on stereotypes (not in any sort of clever way) and obviously highlight some personal bigotry.  

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Shame to hear about Chapelle. I thought I might give it a go, but I'll refrain from watching.

 

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Instead, I watched Ex Machina and holyyyyyyy fuuuuuuuck. One of those 'quiet movies that sneak up on you and punch you in the gut and make you feel it the day after'. There are multiple moments and elements to this film vying for Most Disturbing and it's hard to decide which one got to me most.

 

 

Was it: Nathan casually having sex with his personal aide-android, and how it explains so much about their relationship when you learn she's like a (deliberately?) retarded AI? His shocking death by knifepoint, which is shocking because it is so unexciting and banal, and exactly how I would react if someone were to glide a knife between my ribs? The horror moment of seeing the footage of earlier models trying to escape, even if it means obliterating their arms banging on the door? The fridge horror moment when, even when you already saw it coming, Ava unveils that she didn't give a fuck about Caleb and your realize she was just the most sophisticated AI in her attempt to escape? How Nathan fucking KNEW all of this, but was too arrogant or godlike on his Oppenheimer binge to see the most obvious thing: that he would at one point lose the game of manipulation? Turing tests within Turing tests.

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Ex Machina is so good. Creepy. I love movies about A.I. and this might be my favorite (I think I like it better than Blade Runner - although they are very different movies). Tense, eerie, and at times arrestingly funny.

 

Spoiler

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I'm so so excited about Alex Garland's upcoming adaptation of Annihilation, which I think will suit his sensibilities entirely.

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2 minutes ago, zach said:

I'm so so excited about Alex Garland's upcoming adaptation of Annihilation, which I think will suit his sensibilities entirely.

 

I am wildly excited for Annihilation. The director and the cast seem like such a great match. My only reservation is that Garland says that he wrote the ending without having read the other two books in the trilogy, although I've heard buzz that the endings end up broadly similar anyway.

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I watched Amy Sherman-Palladino pilot an Amazon The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and I think it's actually an exceptionally well constructed pilot. I highly recommend it. it's really different than Gilmore Girls or Bunheads. It's a lot more grown up (I don't mean that just because there's nudity) and better/more mature story telling than her earlier shows had. I would love to talk about it.

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I'm doing my occasional scan of films recently released to streaming and disc and wondering whether I'd enjoy any of them.

 

Has anyone seen Elle? Paul Verhoeven is a bizarre director who occasionally seems to strike gold, and it's been garnering a lot of critical praise. I'm trying to find a single real person who's actually seen it to give me an impression.

 

Same goes for the Love Witch, which if anything sounds stranger. I'm also curious whether anyone had any thoughts on Passengers, because what I've heard is... troubling. It honestly sounds kind of creepy, and not in a good way.

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7 minutes ago, Gwardinen said:

Same goes for the Love Witch, which if anything sounds stranger. I'm also curious whether anyone had any thoughts on Passengers, because what I've heard is... troubling. It honestly sounds kind of creepy, and not in a good way.

 

The plot of Passengers - from what I've heard - reminds me of the "because of the implication"-joke from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

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Passengers is a bland film with a very problematic romance that just wraps up light and fluffy. It's not worth seeing.

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2 hours ago, SuperBiasedMan said:

Passengers is a bland film with a very problematic romance that just wraps up light and fluffy. It's not worth seeing.

 

I had a generally nice but uncritical dude at my work practically fight to the death for the honor of Passengers on the basis that it wasn't so terrible that it burned down his house and killed his cat. I have no idea why some people are sometimes willing to stake their claim on the right for movies to be boring and shitty without criticism.

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14 hours ago, Gwardinen said:

Has anyone seen Elle? Paul Verhoeven is a bizarre director who occasionally seems to strike gold, and it's been garnering a lot of critical praise. I'm trying to find a single real person who's actually seen it to give me an impression.

 

CONTENT WARNING: rape, sexual assault

 

A lot of people I know consider Elle to be one of, if not the, best movies of last year. They are smart and thoughtful people whose taste I trust.

 

That said, I turned if off 40 minutes in because I found it completely fucking awful and offensive. I figured there was some sort of big reveal that would come and make sense of things, but the whole film acts as if a home invasion/violent rape has about the same emotional impact as, say, someone keying your car. The victim is totally unaffected by it, she tells her friends and they don't seem to concerned (one of them she has a relationship with corners her in her office trying to have sex with her and when she tells him she doesn't want to, she was just attacked, he shrugs it off like she's telling him she has a headache) and all in all I just thought it was gross and trying to be provocative for the sake of being provocative.

 

Also Verhoven doesn't have a great track record with women and sexuality, and between the misogynist* Basic Instinct and his "wacky sex comedy where rape is played for laughs" in Turkish Delight I just don't have faith that Elle pulls it out in the final hour and change. I think it is supposed to be more a deconstruction of rape revenge movies than have anything to do with real life but I find even that choice to be repellent. 

 

*Again, some people consider Basic Instinct to be satirical and feminist, but I don't see it at all.

 

----

 

The Love Witch, on the other hand, is amazing. I wrote a long review here, but suffice to say if you have any affection whatsoever for 60's sexploitation, it's a must see.

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I just finished season 4 of The Americans I am starting to feel burned out on the premise, there hasn't been a really new creative idea out of the show for some time. Anyone seen season 5 and know if its worth continuing?

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Broke out the Justice League talk, as it's sustained discussion of a single film and doesn't even fit the description of a "recommendation" given the tone of the response:

(Really trying to encourage more usage of individual threads!)

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Seems like it'd be easier to just make separate threads for each show you wanna talk about. Megathreads suck! *nods*

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17 hours ago, Twig said:

Seems like it'd be easier to just make separate threads for each show you wanna talk about. Megathreads suck! *nods*

 

I might be inclined to agree with you except the Arrowverse (really hate that name) shows are all extremely interconnected, to the point that it's probably easier to have one place to discuss it rather than bouncing back and forth between threads.  Also I'm not sure each show really warrants an entire thread to itself.

 

I might make such a thread since I'm currently watching Arrow and Flash.

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Yeah that's fair. I shouldn't really talk anyway since I have zero interest in the Arrowverse (I also really hate that name).

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On 24/3/2017 at 7:14 PM, Gwardinen said:

Has anyone seen Elle? Paul Verhoeven is a bizarre director who occasionally seems to strike gold, and it's been garnering a lot of critical praise. I'm trying to find a single real person who's actually seen it to give me an impression.

Skip it. The premise is pretty awful and not realistic to me. It's basically a some kind of male fantasy in which the female main character's personality appears so unlogically twisted that it doesn't make sense in any level nor does the director even attempt to really explain it.

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Bummer. I did watch the Love Witch, though, and thoroughly enjoyed it! It's a strange (but interesting and funny) extended meditation on the transaction/negotiation aspects of sex and love between men and women, all wrapped up in a deliberately stereotypical 60s sexploitation movie package. The casting is unbelievably perfect, too. The main character looks like the creator literally went back in time and kidnapped her from the set of a film just like this. The free love liberal arts professor looks and sounds absolutely spot on, and the square-jawed all-American cop so completely suits his role that I would have thought it was a stock image if I'd seen him in a still photo.

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On 3/27/2017 at 1:00 PM, Ben X said:

Good work! :tup:

 

A DC shows thread might be good if you can be bothered to find all the Arrow, Flash, Gotham, Legends Of Tomorrow, Constantine and Supergirl posts (also there are some animated series apparently).

 

I made one for the Arrowverse specifically, which according to Wikipedia specifically consists of the DC shows that air on The CW, including Arrow, The Flash, and Legends of Tomorrow, as well as CW streaming shows like Vixen and Freedom Fighters: The Ray. Of all of those, only Arrow and The Flash have actually had any discussion, which has been consolidated into the new thread:

 

I could find no discussion of Supergirl, and only one mention of the recent Constantine series, so neither of those got threads. (My suspicion is that the megathread makes the ability to discuss new topics very random, as if somebody proposes a topic to discuss, and then instead of someone else immediately responding, some already-ongoing discussion continues, the new query will immediately be wallpapered over with other discussion and it is very unlikely to get resurrected. You have to kind of luck out and hope that somebody receptive to your topic suggestion happens to be browsing at the right moment.)

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I watched Witness the other day because of Jake's endorsement on IIT.

 

It was really good! I don't normally go in for romance movies, but I definitely found the romance stuff in the middle of the movie more compelling than the thriller stuff at the beginning and end. Those elements didn't hold my interest beyond being well-crafted (although the climactic sequence has one of the better deaths I've seen on screen in a while). I enjoyed all the fish out of water stuff with a flummoxed Harrison Ford, and more generally the nuanced exploration of differences in "modern" vs "pastoral" culture that goes beyond the cliché/patronizing "these people are funny and technologically backwards but they have better senses of morality and they really know about the importance of family!" stuff (although I'm not sure it entirely escapes it).

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On 3/28/2017 at 6:29 PM, Cordeos said:

Megathreads now, megathreads tomorrow and megathreads forever!

 

This makes me laugh every time I read it and is also really unfortunate and in bad taste.

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Paterson is such an incredible, beautiful movie. As someone who works a minimum wage job, with no ambitions of marriage or children or career advancement or any of the things the world constantly tells me is vital to being a real person, it was wonderful to see something more resembling my life in a film. There is precious little cinema that doesn't judge low-wage work as either demeaning or romantic.

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On 3/31/2017 at 9:29 PM, Patrick R said:

Paterson is such an incredible, beautiful movie. As someone who works a minimum wage job, with no ambitions of marriage or children or career advancement or any of the things the world constantly tells me is vital to being a real person, it was wonderful to see something more resembling my life in a film. There is precious little cinema that doesn't judge low-wage work as either demeaning or romantic.

 

I second this recommendation. I really liked this movie. There is always this danger of having somebody in a movie who is supposed to be an artist or a professional, and the portrayal of their work feeling false or off. But here everything – both the poems he writes, and the details of his life/relationship to his job – seem true. And like the other two Jarmusch movies I've seen (I aim to see more) the film seems to be very inclusive with its cultural references. The movie didn't make me feel dumb for not being familiar with William Carlos Williams (who is referred to throughout the movie) like some movies might, but it has encouraged me to seek out his poems.

 

Man, the more I think about this movie, the fonder I feel of it.

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Has anyone here watched Boardwalk Empire? I am three episodes in now, it seems all right, but I would love to know if the show gets better or worse before I spend too much time with it. I am glad they toned down the slang after the first episode, it was a bit much.

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