ysbreker

Movie/TV recommendations

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On 2/7/2019 at 4:05 AM, twmac said:

Russian Doll So, according to friends Natasha Lyonne is just doing more of her OitNB schtick here, but having given up on that show after the first season, I am really enjoying this tale of a woman who keeps dying and waking up on her Birthday. I don't want to say too much but it was a fun spin on Groundhog Day and elicited more than a few laughs. Co-created with Amy Poehler and some of that shines through.

Me and the missus loved this, extremely recommended. I could just watch the main character do her thing all day, she's so entertaining.

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On 27/1/2019 at 10:34 PM, Brannigan said:

High Maintenance!

I'm watching it. Through 1st season and into the second. It's... good... and kind of meh sometimes. I think overall I like it, but I wish it had a stronger concept running through it. A good thing is that it's not something that invites you to binge it.

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12 hours ago, Erkki said:

I'm watching it. Through 1st season and into the second. It's... good... and kind of meh sometimes. I think overall I like it, but I wish it had a stronger concept running through it. A good thing is that it's not something that invites you to binge it.

It is very episodic, though there's a throughline that eventually starts to develop

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In case the ff. haven't been mentioned:

 

The Prisoner


 

Quote

 

The Prisoner is a 1967 British science fiction-allegorical television series about an unidentified British intelligence agent who is abducted and imprisoned in a mysterious coastal village, where his captors try to find out why he abruptly resigned from his job.[2] It was created by Patrick McGoohan and George Markstein with McGoohan playing the main role of Number Six.[3] Episodes covered various plots from spy fiction with elements of science fiction, allegory and psychological drama.[4] It was produced by Everyman Films for distribution by Lew Grade's ITC Entertainment company.[4]


 

 

 

The Sandbaggers

 

Quote

The Sandbaggers is a British television drama series about men and women on the front lines of the Cold War. Set contemporaneously with its original broadcast on ITV in 1978 and 1980, The Sandbaggers examines the effect of espionage on the personal and professional lives of British and American intelligence specialists. The series was produced by Yorkshire Television, based in Leeds.

 

 

Doomwatch


 

Quote

 

Doomwatch is a British science fiction television programme produced by the BBC, which ran on BBC1 between 1970 and 1972.[1] The series was set in the then present day, and dealt with a scientific government agency led by Doctor Spencer Quist (played by John Paul), responsible for investigating and combating various ecological and technological dangers.


 

 

 

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I saw Us (award of most unsearchable title goes to?) and man it's weird. I kind of like it, but I'm not sure that it made any sense to me. Might have to digest a bit. Get Out was very clearly understandable compared to this.

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my husband and I went and saw Long Shot this weekend, and if you have any affection at all for romantic comedies, I couldn't not recommend it more. It does what Knocked Up failed to do: make Seth Rogan an interesting, believable, and endearing male romantic lead. I already want to watch it again. Up there with Say Anything & To All The Boys I've Loved Before as my favorites.

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That is high praise!

 

I watched a series of good/ok stuff.

 

Dead to Me - Pretty good series that suffers from awful plotting and the need for the show to be more than just two women coping with grief. The writers seem to think they everyone is going to be interested in a bunch of 'surprises' when it is really the interaction between Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini that is what works. The set up is a Applegate's husband is killed and she meets Cardellini at a group session and the show trundles on from there. What elevates the plot is the sharp dailogue and warmth between the two leads. The ending is bad, but I guess I will keep watching because the leads seem to be having fun.

 

Minding the Gap - Documentary about 3 skater kids in Colorado and what skating and family mean to them. This film hit me so fucking hard, in the life thread a while back I talked about the dissolving of a friendship and one of the guys in the documentary I just immediately identified as him. Really simple story telling, well put together and equal parts deflating and reaffirming.

 

Wine Party - This was one of those films that is generic (friends meet for special time, things get out of hand, they fight and then reconcile) but it basically works thanks to the scene-to-scene fun that most of the cast (Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolpho and Jason Schwartsman especially) inject into what should be super banal.

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Long Shot is the best romantic comedy I've seen since The Big Sick.

 

I'm so glad you watched and enjoyed Minding the Gap. I want everyone to watch it because it's so good.

 

3 hours ago, twmac said:

Minding the Gap - Documentary about 3 skater kids in Colorado and what skating and family mean to them. This film hit me so fucking hard, in the life thread a while back I talked about the dissolving of a friendship and one of the guys in the documentary I just immediately identified as him. Really simple story telling, well put together and equal parts deflating and reaffirming.

 

 

I also watched Minding the Gap back in December. These kids are from a hometown 2 hours from mine in Illinois and this movie made me feel so much. here's what I wrote about it at the time:

 

On 12/13/2018 at 11:16 AM, jennegatron said:

I watched Minding the Gap last night. It is a documentary about 3 young men who became friends through skateboarding and is a movie all about cycles of abuse & poverty in the dying city of Rockford Illinois. I love my home state and have been to Rockford many times for school events in high school. I saw so much of people I knew in this film. It's on hulu and I can't stop thinking about it. I highly recommend it for a look into what it's like living in a rust belt style city in the US as a young person.

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Yessss, it was you that recommended it! The film showed in cinemas in Wroclaw, Poland, so I caught it there.

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I somehow didn’t get into Easy when I first tried to watch it, but when I got through a couple of episodes I started liking it. Reminds me of High Maintenance.

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The Veep series finale was phenomenal. Miles better than Game Of Thrones, too (definitely regretting my decision to move back to the show instead of waiting for the books now).

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22 hours ago, Ben X said:

Miles better than Game Of Thrones, too (definitely regretting my decision to move back to the show instead of waiting for the books now).

 

If it makes you feel better, Martin's said that the endgame that he gave to Benioff and Weiss was just one possible outcome, so any resemblance to the books that'll hopefully come out someday will probably be only passing.

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On a different note, I wouldn't necessarily recommend the new Aladdin movie. Though I will say the Prince Ali song made me laugh out loud, because at the start Will Smith wears a headdress so voluminous all I could think about was that underneath he had the same hair as Rudi van der Saniel.

 

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4 hours ago, Gormongous said:

 

If it makes you feel better, Martin's said that the endgame that he gave to Benioff and Weiss was just one possible outcome, so any resemblance to the books that'll hopefully come out someday will probably be only passing.

 

Ah, that does, thank you! I knew that there would be some rather big differences, but I kind of assumed he'd given them his definite set-in-stone endpoint. Would be great if it were completely different (though not just for the sake of it).

 

And in his latest blog he gives the New Zealand tourism board permission to imprison him in a small cabin until he's finished AWOW if he doesn't have it published in time for his Summer 2020 visit there, so I choose to believe he will definitely have it done by then! Then, what, another 5 years for ADOS?

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6 hours ago, Roderick said:

On a different note, I wouldn't necessarily recommend the new Aladdin movie. Though I will say the Prince Ali song made me laugh out loud, because at the start Will Smith wears a headdress so voluminous all I could think about was that underneath he had the same hair as Rudi van der Saniel.

 

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Judging from the clip of Aladdin I saw, Will Smith could really have used that new sound.

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Saw Bad Times at the El Royale half a year late. Generally speaking, I like Drew Goddard, but this movie needed someone else on the script or a different person directing, because it was full of bright ideas (including one tremendous scene involving an a cappella rendition of "You Can't Hurry Love") but struggled to integrate them into its flashback-heavy chronology without gutting the pacing. By the time that a surprisingly miscast Chris Hemsworth showed up, I'd mostly broken up with the film, but I imagine it'll be one of those experiences where I remember only the high points a couple years from now, like its motifs of people pushed to the fringes and the need for absolution, and not that it overstayed its welcome by a good half an hour.

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Hemsworth was actually one of the only parts of the movie that worked for me. I thought he did a great job at being charismatic and seductive, which is the main trait of that character.

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I wanted to catch this in theatres last year, but it was out before I got a chance. Persumably it badly flopped? Will see this at some later point, maybe on Nootflix.

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On 6/9/2019 at 9:40 AM, TychoCelchuuu said:

Hemsworth was actually one of the only parts of the movie that worked for me. I thought he did a great job at being charismatic and seductive, which is the main trait of that character.

 

 

I feel like, if you're riffing on Manson, you need more than just charisma. You need the threat of extreme violence, and the bar's got to be higher than "Sometimes shoots people for no reason" because that's already a character trait of half the cast. But hey! Diff'rent strokes.

 

Actually, they had a Phil Spector stand-in and just used him for a #MeToo flourish, so I don't really know what I was expecting with this movie's historical shoutouts.

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Also, I was such a big fan of the first couple seasons of Letterkenny and I was hoping that the fifth-season premiere was a sign of better things to come, after the slump of the third and fourth seasons, but instead it was bad and the sixth season is even worse. Jared Keeso has clearly chewed through all his material about small-town life in rural Canada and, accordingly, has fallen back on the last resorts of every long-running comedy: flanderization and in-jokes. The show's tight dialogue, a cocktail of obscure slang run through a byzantine syntax, has devolved into repetitive patter that fills up way too much time. Sometimes a joke going on for too long can be funny (and it was, in earlier seasons), but it's basically Letterkenny's only class of joke at this point. For example, their gag about "To be fair" is four seasons old now and the humor is entirely that they haven't forgotten said gag.  I wish they would. I wish I could.

 

The fifth and sixth seasons are also odd because they feature cartoonish portrayals of Quebecois, Mennonites, and... gay men? I guess the show used up all its earnestness looking at farmers, druggies, and the natives on the neighboring reservation. I can tell that the writing of recent seasons wants to push this show to a fantastical place where everything can be exaggerated and outrageous (a place where there's more and easier material, presumably) but I just miss episodes like "A Fuss in the Back Bush" or "The Native Flu." Oh well!

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I've been slowly watching the HBO miniseries Chernobyl.  While I have a better than average understanding of the technical side, seeing all the mismanagement that occurred is absolutely terrifying considering that we're still doing it (not necessarily in the nuclear industry but certainly in other areas *cough*climate change*cough*).

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Chernobyl is great! (onlythe last episode is a bit weaker, the 4th one has some amazing shots IIRC)

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Everyone's talking about Chernobyl, but I just feel like... it must be really, very sad, right? I don't wanna watch a whole show about something so terribly sad!

 

I've had a blu-ray of Get Out on my table for weeks and I finally watched it. I purposely avoided spoilers for this.

It was a good concept, it's very contemporary, I respect it and I bet it really clicked with a lot of people. It's big on sub-text, and really invites you to look into it. It's a very cliche thriller though! I didn't expect how straight-forward the film was, it's a new idea applied to the very familiar frame of a movie where a spooky killer is getting everyone. That's fun, but I guess I expected it to be something more surprising.

 

Oh well! I still liked watching it. It's not pretentious, the film speaks its' message loudly, and couches it in a nice popcorn flick deliberately. I can see why people were excited to check out Us next.

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5 hours ago, I_smell said:

Everyone's talking about Chernobyl, but I just feel like... it must be really, very sad, right? I don't wanna watch a whole show about something so terribly sad!

 

I mean... Chernobyl is certainly sad but that's not what the show is about.  It's not about making you feel bad or guilty or even sympathetic (though you probably will as a consequence), it's a frank presentation of the events (with some dramatic liberties but for the most part it seems genuine).  The biggest emotion I felt was fear.  Not fear of what transpired but fear of the chain of lies, ignorance, and straight up denial that lead to it even happening, coupled with the fact that IT'S STILL GOING ON RIGHT NOW.

 

Anyway I finished the last episode.  As someone who is very interested in the technical side I rather enjoyed his simplified explanation of what happened.  It's pretty accurate if not minimalistic but more than enough for the needs of the scene.  It drags a bit at times but overall I quite liked the series and recommend it to anyone with even a remote interest.

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I saw The Last Black Man in San Francisco in the Alamo Drafthouse theatre. I think it’s mostly that I’m not local why I didn’t get it, but I saw/heard some local people really enjoying it!

 

I got that it was about the San Francisco housing crisis and the racism related to that, but for me it didn’t connect at all.

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