ysbreker

Movie/TV recommendations

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Ooh, I love blatant viral marketing. It makes me feel so special when a PR firm or production company says "HAY GAIS WE R JUST LIKE YOU RLY".

^ I was wrong

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I resent that, I'm no shill. Just saw it the other night :shifty:

I only registered to play hitchhik.exe multiplayer. :violin:

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Man, stupid time zones. I miss all the fun controversial stuff.

Finally saw The Darjeeling Limited last night. Top quality stuff. :tup: :tup:

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Despite my age (39), I still love cartoons - especially funky ones (even if they're made for kids). :grin: There's a newish one on Cartoon Network called Chowder. It's about a little kid who's a chef's apprentice in the town of Marzipan. It's just lots of fun. Here's one recent episode:

The Sing Beans (I hope those outside of N. America can see it) (edit: there's a 'commercial' in the middle.)

One that I wish they had available is called Grubble Gum. The last part of that episode reminds me of Katamari Damacy.

5591.jpg

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I've watched three movies in theaters recently, all of them were surprises.

Michael Clayton was a surprisingly good movie despite featuring 1. an evil-evil environmentalist corporation plot 2. a scenarist directing for the first time 3. what I though would be a patronizing George Clooney 4. Pollack in the same role once again.

For the best,he plot quickly forgets its techno thriller roots to center around the awesome characters - including one if not THE best madman ever depicted in a mainstream movie - which it follows with a very slow pace. It is not forcefuly introspective, it is diluted and Clooney is very good. It also contains the greatest assassination scene ever, making me wish the guy was helming Hitman... the only downside is that the movie doesn't sem to have the guts to end without a bang.

Youth without Youth is the kind of film which critics might describe as "the kind of movie that the audience will find either miraculous or definitely broken". For me it's the latter and not even Tim Roth can the save it from how bad it is. The movie has the cast, the cinematography, the mise-en-scène and the setup of a rigorous mainstream movie... but the way it's cut, the way the 'story' unfolds gave me the impression of watching a bad novel adaptation butchered by a thousand script doctors : at best, it's ridiculous, at worst, it doesn't make any sense. The most aggravating is that the confusion isn't the downside of a certain complexity because there doesnt seem to ven be a point to this movie.

In the Valley of Elah has an encouraging first half hour during which Tommy Lee Jones fails at doing basic investigation in a very quiet atmosphere. But after that, neither the plot, nor the underlaying political discourse or the character thickens... it's not boring but it's pretty shallow. The so-called political message is a pretty simplistic one 'People aren't bad, the army is" : every army man is basically depicted as a psycho, a drug dealer, a wife beater, a liar or, if retired, socially retarded... and it's not like the movie put the blame on the war : the settings could be any of the balkan conflict of the past 40 years, it wouldn't change a thing.

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Spaff told me to watch Dragon Wars, based on the trailer he saw. The bastard. OK so the trailer did make it look like stupid fun. The action sequences are admittedly pretty good, but the acting and dialogue and plot are just atrocious.

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Spaff told me to watch Dragon Wars, based on the trailer he saw. The bastard. OK so the trailer did make it look like stupid fun. The action sequences are admittedly pretty good, but the acting and dialogue and plot are just atrocious.

There's a (potentially) better giant monster movie coming http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount/11808/

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I still say that as giant monster movies go, The Host was the best I've seen in a very long time.

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I was long a fan of TVGoHome, especially Cunt. It got made into a TV series called Nathan Barley:

9 minutes: "I'm a self-facilitating media node" :hah:

I'm confused, Nachimir; are you liking or hating Nathan Barley? :erm:

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I am liking the series. It shows him as an obnoxious prick, while also showing other characters hating him but selling out.

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I am liking the series. It shows him as an obnoxious prick, while also showing other characters hating him but selling out.

Ah, good!

I particularly liked it because it's very cutting around where I work (in Bristol) because there are an awful lot of Barleys around here. I shit you not... :hah:

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I can imagine...

There was one on a coach I took a few weeks ago, and he even managed to slip a "That's just how I roll, that's just how I roll" into his loud, obnoxious, never-ending phone conversation. I used to seethe at them, but since watching Nathan Barley I can only laugh :)

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What on Earth is going on in Britland nowadays? First the Chavs, now the Idiots? Here in the Netherlands we still just have your regular variety of punks on the street.

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What on Earth is going on in Britland nowadays? First the Chavs, now the Idiots? Here in the Netherlands we still just have your regular variety of punks on the street.

I think Damon Albarn & Co. put it best in one of their songs last year:

Today is dull and mild, on a stroppy little island of mixed up people.

:violin:

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Bizarrely, I'm actually quite liking the chavs now, but only at arms length. They're aggressive, status obsessed little fucks who later become equally status obsessed, beefy, bruised motherfuckers.

As such, they appropriate every single obnoxious status symbol society has and corrupt it. One of the poorest, roughest estates in Nottingham has a main road that connects to the city, and every saturday it gives a trickle of garishly done out hire limos full of screaming hen parties and priapic stag dos. This I like: Openly obnoxious people normalising obnoxious things. If they can't buy it they'll rent it, and even things out of their price range, like expensive champagne, get appropriated by their celebrity heroes... who in turn are catering to their market of chavs :)

(Edit: Burberry, for one, are quite pissed off. Since chavs appropriated it, the amount of their products using the fabric have dropped from 50% to around 5% :))

I think the middle class pissing competitions I had to see as a kid will be irrevocably changed now. No more equivalent to early nineties dads wandering out in the garden to show off a new cordless phone to the neighbors... street wide new car competitions won't go away, but some of that kind of thing will just be seen as chavvy.

I hope :(

In fact, I suspect the whole "keeping up with the Joneses" thing about middle class Britain is one of the cultural roots of chavness, and was ripe for combination with the fronting of American R&B culture in the late '90s and early '00s.

Nathan Barleys aren't nearly so widespread in the UK (They're in London and Bristol mostly, as far as I can tell, and are likely to spread to other meeja hubs like Manchester if they haven't already), but at the moment they seem to get laughed at a lot further north.

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Nathan Barleys aren't nearly so widespread in the UK (They're in London and Bristol mostly, as far as I can tell, and are likely to spread to other meeja hubs like Manchester if they haven't already), but at the moment they seem to get laughed at a lot further north.

Oh they're laughed at around here too, believe me. A local web-dev mailing list often has little tirades about such types, even though a lot of people on there are actually of said demographic.

And get it right: it's "noo meeja" foo'!

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Y'know, it's odd, but with all the fantastic shows that are on TV at the moment that could be vying for my attention, what I'm actually watching right now is about 15 years old. Last time I walked into HMV I saw that they had each season of the X Files on for $20 a piece. I picked up the first three and every time I have a free 45 minutes between work, school, and life I'm just watching another episode. I was only really old enough for the show when it was winding down, and the seasons I'm watching right now I've never seen before as I was 4 years old when they started airing. There's a bit of a "what the fuck?" condescending chuckle now and then (having someone explain in vitro fertilization to Scully, who is supposedly a medical doctor, gave me a double take) but in all honesty, I don't think that $60 could have been better spent.

Going to see a special screening at the university tomorrow of Join Us, a documentary about people undergoing cult deprogramming. Really promising premise, and I'm looking forward to it. It's going through the festival circuit right now, so I'll pipe up sometime soon with how I liked it.

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Last time I walked into HMV I saw that they had each season of the X Files on for $20 a piece. I picked up the first three and every time I have a free 45 minutes between work, school, and life I'm just watching another episode.

Season 2 is without doubt some of the best serialised TV I've seen that side of earlier BSG seasons.

Going to see a special screening at the university tomorrow of Join Us, a documentary about people undergoing cult deprogramming. Really promising premise, and I'm looking forward to it. It's going through the festival circuit right now, so I'll pipe up sometime soon with how I liked it.

Agreed, premise does sound good. Would like to know what you thought of it, definitely.

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Sci Fi's forth-coming "darkly re-imagined Wizard of Oz" series, Tin Man, looks vaguely interesting.

And did anyone else spot Discovery's new, hotly tipped Rise of the Video game documentary series which premiered this week? No, me neither. ;(

Luckily, it's available for download already via a) the miracle of Google and B) the use of a particular word which describes 'a violently fast stream'... :shifty:

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Tin Man looks quite nice, but I can't really say what it's going to be like yet.

Anyway, I just saw The Importance of Being Earnest again; the 2002 movie with Colin Firth and Judy Dench. It was just as delicious as when I saw it a few months ago on the BBC. What a great adaptation of Wilde's play and what exuberant roles. Especially Algernon is just a delight to look at =)

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