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Movie/TV recommendations

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On 1/2/2017 at 2:38 PM, pabosher said:

 

I genuinely have no idea how anyone enjoys this show. Putting aside the fact that I think it shares nothing w DG bar the name, I just... don't get it. It's unfunny, frustrating, and the characters are all hateable. A shame, bc the cast is actually pretty good!

I dunno, I hear SpeedyDesiato likes it, maybe ask him?

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7 hours ago, Zeusthecat said:

I finally saw The Martian.

 

It was okay but man there were a lot of things that bothered me about the movie. I actually enjoy Matt Damon quite a bit and I think his performance is the only thing that really holds the movie together. They spent too much time on other characters but not enough time for me to become invested in any of them. I didn't like that a random genius comes out of nowhere to offer a clever solution to get Matt Damon home and then promptly disappears, never to be seen or mentioned again. I also think the classic rock montages of Damon doing Mars shit were poorly executed and way too drawn out. But what bothered me most is how they Hollywood-ified so many parts of the movie to add tension. I was able to completely predict the series of events and setbacks that Matt Damon would experience because they literally just pulled out The Checklist that so many movies seem to follow. The only thing I didn't predict was that Iron Man shit because I just didn't think they would get that ridiculous.

 

It really just made me want to go watch Cast Away again.

Some of that is probably them trying to cover as much of the book as possible in a film. Those characters are much more fleshed out in the books.

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7 hours ago, Ben X said:

The Expanse, which  I really enjoyed. It looks great, has a bunch of character actors doing good work, and the world-building is really detailed and interesting. Only ten episodes, too, which was a good choice. It doesn't spoon-feed you exposition, either, which is great. Unfortunately, it instead ends you off to exposition fat camp and wires your jaw shut. That is to say, it's very hard to follow what's going on, harder than The Wire for instance. After about five of the episodes and some Wikipedia episode summary readings, I had a feel for how all the different factions and plot threads intersected.

 


Only the Earth plotline lets it down - it could easily be lifted out wholesale without affecting the rest of the show, and it revolves around a miscast Shohreh Aghdashloo, who fluffs pretty much every single line reading.

I am excited that they decided to not try and cram one book into each season. S1 ends about 3/4 of the way through the first book. Also the Earth storyline is fabricated by the show, they wanted to bring Avasarala into the show earlier than she appears in the books and she doesn't even swear as much as she should :(

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Yeah, I was going to say it feels like it's in there purely because they know actual important Earth stuff is coming up in the future.

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My partner and I really liked The Expanse season one but we're a little tentative on s2 after seeing the trailer. Idk I just hope it stays a sci-fi noir political drama.

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49 minutes ago, Mawd said:

My partner and I really liked The Expanse season one but we're a little tentative on s2 after seeing the trailer. Idk I just hope it stays a sci-fi noir political drama.

As someone who has read all the books I can say yeah pretty much.

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I binged on the newest season of Voltron: Legendary Defender despite being cool on the first season.  The second one is an improvement on the first in pretty much every aspect (although the plot is a bit muddier due to the introduction of many unanswered questions).  It has a good pace mixing character and action in a satisfying ratio.  I'd still say it has the same problems though.  It's very predictable and I find many of the characters more annoying than amusing (I hate Coran so much).  If I had to describe the show I'd say it was a 90s cartoon mixed with the Teen Titans series. 

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The Expanse was great, I loved Thomas Jane in that show. He is framed as this hardass alcoholic detective but he has all these wonderfully effeminate flourishes to his character (they way he plays with his hat and hair), I heard that the show already diverges quite heavily from the show - for those that have read the book I am glad. Even if would make sense.

 

I just watched Krisha , it is about a woman trying to reconnect with her family after a long separation. The writing and the central performance is shit hot. Speaking as someone that has a big family with one member being extremely destructive and hateful, but also craving the support and love of the rest of her family it hit a nerve. There are some spot on representations of being hardcore drunk, better than Leaving Las Vegas,  and waking up half drunk and half hungover. Really great but totally harrowing at the same time.

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I saw Split, it started okay then got really fucking stupid.  

 

Also I don't want an M Night cinematic universe, that is also stupid.

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Series 1 of The Fall was very promising. Good performances, really well-edited, good pace, relatively small scale (though all the stuff with the murdered cop was completely unnecessary and dumb), a real psychological depth...but Series 2 throws it all out. It was a compelling portrayal of a serial killer as an addict, a real man whose complicated web of lies starts tightening around his neck as he tries to feed this addiction. Now he's just The Joker, taking insane risks at every turn that always pay off for him, risking exposure to the cops all the time for no good reasons, and trailed by a totally gross serial killer groupie. It's the sort of nonsense that made me stop watching Hannibal.

 

TV is a terrible medium. People should stop watching TV.

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Watched the Ratchet and Clank movie tonight.  It was fun!  Not like super great, but both the lady and I are fans of the games, and it was definitely worth the watch.  I imagine if someone had never played the games, it probably wouldn't be as charming and would be a lot more confusing. 

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I just finished watching The Lobster and I don't think I have anything meaningful to add other than it made me laugh a lot. Like, it might be favourite black comedy ever.

 

I hear it is in the running for Oscars, I don't think it will win it but, man, everyone (even Rachel Weisz) is in top form.

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I just discovered Tokyo Diner: Midnight Stories on Netflix. The low stakes of resolving awkward emotional conflicts is like a really welcome form of mental relief in the current anxiety soaked era.

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Did anyone who tried out Filmstruck end up sticking with it?  I saw that they just added chromecast support (finally) which means I can actually watch movies on it since during my free trial I literally had no way of getting the movies onto my tv.  

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I dropped American services I don't need when trump got elected, also I had to use VPN to access it which I normally don't do.

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Would folks object to my splitting out some conversations in here into their own threads about the particular film/series being discussed? I don't mean one-off posts; but given this is a 461-page thread that's been going on for well over a decade, I think it might not be the best place to carry out sustained discussions and suspect it may actually discourage discussion that people might otherwise have if there were more threads.

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Do it, even if in the future people will think I was asshole-ishly dropping Ghostbusters2016-bashing non-sequiturs! :tup:

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Urging people to see I Am Not Your Negro (and also read as much James Baldwin as possible!) We're gonna need that sort of moral and intellectual clarity if we're gonna get through the next few years...

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My co-worker put Louis Malle's Atlantic City in his part of the employee recommendations section around the same time that TheLastBaron mentioned really liking it in the Demasters thread*, so I figured divine hands were at play and I checked it out.

 

IT IS AMAZING. Absolutely beautiful character piece/crime film about an aging small-time hood (Burt Lancaster, unrecognizable if you only know him from the 50's and 60's) who stumbles into an opportunity to play the big shot in order to impress a young neighbor (Susan Sarandon) he's infatuated with. Really amazing achingly vulnerable humanity from all the characters (even ones who initially appear to be comic relief) without ever losing a light and entertaining tone. The line it straddles between real heartbreak and fairy tale whimsy is very impressive.

 

*I'm assuming we are talking about the same Atlantic City.

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On 2/8/2017 at 1:10 PM, Patrick R said:

The line it straddles between real heartbreak and fairy tale whimsy is very impressive.

This is a really good point, there's a element of levity that is so incredible in the film.  Without it the film could have easily ended up being something like The Panic in Needle Park as far as being a somber but human character piece depicting ordinary people's lives intersecting amidst a backdrop of filth. The fact that the characters in Atlantic City are aiming for something more than just getting by makes the movie actually entertaining.  Burt Lancaster and Susan Sarandon are so good.  Like you say, it's definitely not the older (or rather earlier) Lancaster from things like From Here to Eternity or Elmer Gantry, but he's still so compelling.  I think the first time I saw Atlantic City I immediately went and watched Local Hero because I wanted more old Burt.  The film is super fun, but without coming at the expense of also being very real and honest.

 

For the record I really like The Panic in Needle Park, but I would have a really hard time calling it entertaining or enjoyable.  It's very hard to watch which Atlantic City is absolutely not.

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So is anyone else glad that Imdb is shutting down their forums?

 

As much as I liked some of the forums where lesser known movies were talked about the whole place became a real garbage hellhole of hate. You couldn't really go to any newer show or movie without it becoming some right wing hate fest. Either that or on a much lesser offense, every forum had a "worst movie ever" troll thread.

 

I guess it sucks that they aren't preserving the archives for when there was some more civil and interesting discussion but man, the place is owned by Amazon and even though they are the biggest retailer in the world they couldn't afford a sufficient amount of moderators? Real shame they couldn't just let their money do that instead so we could continue to have a place to talk about specific movies that may not be cool enough to have their own Reddit. I think I posted 30 times there in the last 14 years and half of them were about Little Nemo but I would report people and they would never disappear. The Sense8 boards were just atrocious, you could look up these people's accounts and see they were just finding some reason to hate on every show that had a "gay agenda." How could these people never be banned? What on earth?

 

I heard Letterboxd will fill the gap with those serious about movies though so maybe I should look into an account there.

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I have slowly been working through a big list of films that I "should" have seen, or want to see.

 

Today, I watched Wadjda (2012), a film about an 11- or 12- year old in Saudi Arabia. It was directed by Haifaa al-Mansour, and according to Wikipedia it was "first feature film shot entirely in Saudi Arabia and the first feature-length film made by a female Saudi director."

 

It comments on the restrictions put on women in oppressive situations, like in Saudi Arabia, and how some women try to break out of those situations and others reinforce them. It's a fairly simple story and told in a very straightforward way. It feels very inspired by Bicycle Thieves, the 1948 Italian neorealist film. It's a very quiet film, but I think the points of tension stand for much grander issues.

 

If you are interested in seeing more films by female directors, and films about women, then I'd definitely add it to your watchlist.

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