ysbreker

Movie/TV recommendations

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Excellent, thanks SAM and Gorm and SAM's friend!

 

Erkki, give it another one or two eps at least! One thing I really enjoy about it is getting a look at Japanese culture and social etiquette.

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2 hours ago, Gormongous said:

 

The really weird thing about the first season of Steven Universe is that, if you go back and watch it through again once you've gotten to season four or five, there are a lot of surprisingly specific references to later reveals (looking at you, "Keep Beach City Weird"). Rebecca Sugar and her team had it planned out from the start, they just took forever to get there for some reason.

 

I went looking online for skip guides to the first season, which is harder than you'd think since the fandom is adamant that every piece of content (except for the Uncle Grandpa crossover, of course) is absolutely essential to the experience. This one seems pretty good, if you just stick to the green episodes, although it focuses more on which episodes contribute to the lore than on which episodes contribute to character development. I'm curious to see what SAM's friend says, though.

 

Yeah Steven U has a ton of little hints sprinkled throughout the show.  A bunch of subtle (and not so subtle) callbacks will be missed by not watching everything but the majority of what makes the show great will still come though.  I'd make the list myself but I'm not nearly as well versed in the show as I am something like Star Trek.

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Days of Heaven (1978) is super good. It's maybe my favourite Terrence Malick movie so far. I don't give it the full 5 stars only because I am not a huge fan of the distance Malick keeps from the characters, making them seem slightly unreal. But it's shot perfectly, I'm glad I am still discovering films this good after watching through what I thought was almost all of the highest rated classics in the past few years.

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Tale of Tales (1979) is a Soviet animated short and it is really good. By the same guy who made Hedgehog in the Fog, which is really famous in Estonia, but I had never seen Tale of Tales before. Watching it kind of felt like something between Tarkovsky’s The Mirror and Don Hertzfeldt’s World of Tomorrow.

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Jacques Rivette is a pretty weird French New Wave director. I’ve seen several of his films and I kind of like parts of them, but also think that they are too weird and long. Noroit has really cool weirdly diegetic music, but I think Celine and Julie Go Boating is his most accessible film. At least it kept my interest better than the others. So if you want to watch at least one Rivette film (and you should), this is the one.

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A fairly recent addition to Netflix, is To All The Boys I've Loved Before. It follows a high school student, Lara Jean, who writes love letters to the boys she gets crushes on and then puts them in her closet. She uses them as an outlet for her feelings but never intends on them being sent. Through wacky circumstances they get mailed out and one recipient, Peter, a former crush from middle school, approaches her to ask her to help him. He wants to get his ex-girlfriend back and thinks making her jealous by pretending to date Lara Jean is the way to make that happen. Lara Jean agrees on his promise that he won't tell people about the letter. 

 

I am a huge sucker for teen movies. My favorite movie of all time is Say AnythingDazed & Confused + Ferris Bueller's Day Off is my first warm day of spring double feature. Edge of Seventeen, which I gushed about on these forums, is one of my favorite movies of the past 5 years. The more contrived the concept, the more earnestly executed the better. ...Boys I've Loved Before is an extremely sweet movie and plays out about how you expect, but is so enjoyable in the process. Lara Jean goes from a passive girl, lonely and oblivious to an active participant in her life. It's an adorable love story with characters that I enjoyed spending time with. I love a movie about the interior life of a teen girl. It's hard being a young person figuring out what to do with the feelings you have. 

 

If you're looking for something light to watch for a date night or just a palate cleanser for the hell dimension we live in, I can't recommend it enough. It did acutely remind me that I am closer to 30 than to 16, so prepare yourself for that.

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I love that film a lot,e specially because it manages to sidestep or subvert almost every toxic trope. My favourite bit is how the boys are the emotionally mature ones.

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Ugh, I just read that all David Milch contributed to the upcoming third season of True Detective was a co-author credit on the fourth episode's script. Otherwise, it's the same authoritarian grip of Nick Pizzolatto that drove the second season into the ground, down even to forcing a popular and talented director out of the project over creative differences. Bummer.

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2 hours ago, Gormongous said:

Ugh, I just read that all David Milch contributed to the upcoming third season of True Detective was a co-author credit on the fourth episode's script. Otherwise, it's the same authoritarian grip of Nick Pizzolatto that drove the second season into the ground, down even to forcing a popular and talented director out of the project over creative differences. Bummer.

I honestly thought that S2 had killed the series

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2 hours ago, Cordeos said:

I honestly thought that S2 had killed the series

 

It was dead for a while, but I think HBO is looking at a near future where Game of Thrones is finished, its spinoffs don't take off, and people continue to not really care about Westworld, so they're flinging as many balls into the air in the hopes that some of them stay up there long enough to catch people's attention. That's why Deadwood's getting a movie sequel, for instance.

 

There was a bunch of noise six or so months ago about how Milch was joining the revived show in a major production role, but of course it was just a stunt and the show's actually looking quite severely undercast except for Mahershala Ali.

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I guess I am one of the few people that actually liked Season 2.

 

Colin Farrel is great in it, I actually think he is great in most things he does but he had that Leonardo Di Caprio period where he was too much of a heart throb for people's tastes. Sure, it isn't the tour de force of Season 1 but I found the interplay between the four main characters really compelling, even if Taylor Kitsch remains flat as always, it actually works for him. I know the idle thumbs crew did not like that shoot out, but the brutality of it left me breathless as this wild explosion in the middle of a very slow build up. Even Vince Vaughn in the desert was really cool.

 

Also, I am a huge Masherhala Ali fan, it has been a delight watching the slight awkward stereotype in Predators blossom through shows like 3800 and House of Cards.

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Trevor Lacom who plays Colin Farrell's adorable chubby faced son is the best and only reason to watch season 2 to me.

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@twmac

We proud few!  I also enjoyed season 2, although it had quite a different feel to it than the first...  It took me a couple of episodes to warm to the casting of Vince Vaughn, but in the end I bought into it.

I tend to suspect that the 'iron grip' that Gormongous objects to Mr Pizzolatto having was also what made the original season so unique and worthwhile.

Also, I am so very glad that Deadwood is getting a movie sequel...  The premature death of that series remains my worst executive-meddling-in-a-TV-series disappointment to date, I think.  Presumably the actors will have aged sufficiently that they will have to set it a decent amount of time after the series, which is a shame - the continuity of watching the (violent, amoral) 'coming of civilization' to the town as buildings grew and became more permanent, and each round of new folks vying for power became more brutal and better organised was a thing of beauty.

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32 minutes ago, BonusWavePilot said:

I tend to suspect that the 'iron grip' that Gormongous objects to Mr Pizzolatto having was also what made the original season so unique and worthwhile.

 

Nah, I think the special spice was the interaction between Pizzolatto's writing and Cary Fukunaga's directing, but the two clashed repeatedly during the filming and seem to have parted on bad terms, at least to gauge from the inclusion of a primadonna film director wearing Fukunaga's trademark braid-and-bun in the third episode of the second season of True Detective. Pizzolatto also seems to have taken steps to keep another director from exerting the same level of influence on the production, given that no director helmed more than two episodes of the second season and most only got one. I was glad to hear that Jeremy Saulnier, the director behind the excellent Blue Ruin and Green Room, was on board to direct an unspecified number of episodes in the third season, but then he exited the project after only two and Pizzolatto stepped up to co-direct the remaining six with Daniel Sackheim, a fairly rank-and-file TV director.

 

It seems like Pizzolatto has trouble sharing his toys,  which is unsurprising given that his only other experience before True Detective was working in the writer's room for The Killing and disliking the lack of control there, and I can't help but wonder if the lack of a strong directorial vision between the episodes of the second season were what made it so underwhelming for many people. Who knows, maybe sharing the directing chair with a guy who's done everything from Law and Order to The Walking Dead to Game of Thrones will be enough to help Pizzolatto achieve the vision that he clearly feels he has. I'm certainly open to (and would welcome) that possibility!

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I've recently discovered a good film criticism channel on YouTube by Kyle Kallgren called Brows Held High: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0KaZd_ki4l2EUc1GY9u5Ew

 

I find that he draws interesting connections between things that I haven't usually thought of myself. Somewhat thanks to him being educated in theater IIRC. He is occasionally awkward and somewhy explicitly dwells on being awkward in the videos, but I got used to it. But anyway I find some of his reviews / vlogs really intriguing.

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I've added one of his vids to my watch later list, thanks! I'm always on the look out for film crit channels that don't a) revolve around hating on stuff, sunglasses) come with a load of memes and tired schtick, c) spend five minutes making one simple point over and over.

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BTW. I realize I should have added an example. I don't know if I have a favourite, but this was pretty good analysis of some cultural aspects of The Love Witch

 

He looks at what the critics think are the influences on this film and then contradicts those with what the filmmaker Anna Biller has cited and explicitly referenced herself and then connects it to feminism and the male gaze of film historians. There's almost always something surprising an insightful (to me) similar to this in his videos.

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Has anyone seen Dirty Computer, the "Emotion Picture" by Janelle Monáe? I just watched it and it's visually amazing. Kind of a cross between movie and music video, I guess in the same way as Beyoncé's Lemonade, which I haven't seen. It reminds me a lot of Claire Boucher's (Grimes') videos and it's really just perfectly shot.

 

 

I don't know if it should be called movie? But then again I'm not sure if calling it an "emotion picture" is a bit pretentious, as if something completely new had been invented. Anyway, it's worth a watch, but most of it is just her music videos + some more stuff in between to tie some kind of basic boring story together.

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I don't know if I want to dump on you all the good movies that I'm going to see at PÖFF during the next few weeks, but I saw two really good ones today, so very happy with how the festival is starting for me.

 

Happy as Lazzaro by Alice Rohrwacher is amazing, and I think it's on Netflix in some countries (not here)? It is emotionally very strong, it made me cry a bit and not a lot of movies have managed that lately. Initially I had a question why it looked technically almost sub-par but it seemed deliberate so I didn't let it distract me and I think in the end it's a justified look for the film. There is some magical realism which seems slightly off putting but also somehow feels justified in the end. There is complexity to this that I haven't seen in a lot of movies lately. I felt very emotionally connected to the movie throughout and maybe that just pushed the logical thinking to the background, but I got a feeling of mystery that I also haven't gotten lately from any other movies. Definitely recommend!

 

Also, I saw The Greenaway Alphabet, which is a movie about Peter Greenaway (The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover) made by his wife and with his daughter as the interviewer. It's quite interesting, and gives a little glimpse into who is Peter Greenaway.

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Mandy and Ultra Pulpe (Apocalypse After) (short) are two movies I saw that have really cool audiovisual style. However, Mandy's (Nicholas Cage in the lead) plot is really straightforward revenge story that doesn't really have any interesting angle besides the style of the movie being kind of like Heavy Metal albums (kind of like the doomy parts of Brütal Legend I would maybe say).

 

Ultra Pulpe is made by Bertrand Mandico, who I find to be one of the interesting directors at the moment. It's somewhat erotic, like many (all?) of his films.

 

I thought both of the movies have somewhat of a Mario Bava like lighting style, and now it has made me want to do some rewatching of Mario Bava movies.

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Long Day’s Journey Into Night is a really trippy movie. I don't know if it's the first movie to ever do this (someone tell me if you do know any others), but I think the director purposefully tried to make the viewers fall asleep during the first half so that they would identify better with the main character in the second half, which is a single hour long take in 3D. It worked in my case, but it also meant I didn't really follow the story up to the point where that starts.

 

Anyway, I'm kind of happy that I experienced it this way (accidentally), thanks to being really tired.

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I don't know how easy this movie will be to see, but Wandering Girl, while not perfect, is a really pretty movie about sisterhood and grief. I think with this film it really hit home for me that we men really need to find new ways to express masculinity that are free of the still current (toxic) idea of masculinity that is mostly related to aggression and emotionlessness. After seeing the movie I really feel in a bigger way than before that there's a big hole there that needs to be filled. I think the movie still has some male gaze in it (being directed by a man, even if with a mostly female crew and cast) but maybe the conflict between what seemed to me to be the male gaze and the tenderness of the rest of it, was deliberately so in the movie. I wanted to ask the director, who was there, but couldn't formulate the question well enough during the Q&A.

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Steve McQueen's Widows is pretty spectacular, people. Careful structuring of the plot, taking enough time to clearly establish the characters and keeping some of its cards neatly to itself to establish a few late-movie surprises that work. Not to mention the stellar performances of the cast!

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I've been psyched for Widows since I saw the trailer a month or so back, I really hope it comes to Thailand, but due to the cast and the director there is a good chance it won't (I don't think we even got Ocean's 8 over here).

 

 

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