[Lady Bliss]

QuickTidal, on 25 October 2022 - 04:42 PM, said:

Abyss, on 25 October 2022 - 03:25 PM, said:

Tsundoku, on 25 October 2022 - 10:20 AM, said:

So apparently some of you are fans of "Dark"?

https://www.youtube....h?v=p7OUQ9U2qIw

I'm intrigued.

It looks good, and word of mouth is that it's damned good storytelling. I will be checking it out.

This does look good! When does it come out?

[QuickTidal]

AMCs INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE had it's finale (on AMC+ that is, I think the cable screening of the episode is this weekend)...and it was stunningly good. They've split the first book/story in a clean spot (in fact, if you've seen the movie you can probably guess at what point the first season ends if it's half the story) and the new framing narrative really adds so much, including the reveal that I guessed at last week...

BIG HONKIN SPOILERS

Spoiler

That 2022's manservant Rashid, is in actuality 514 year old Vampire Armand, and Louis' companion and professed "love of his life" in a moment that made me go....oh shit....Louis is a prisoner!....fuck me..... I love when Molloy calls him out on the fact that he's seen him standing in the sun and Armand is like "We gain the power to withstand it as we age, and what is the light of a dying star to a 514 year old Vampire?"

Lestat's almost reveal of the existence of Akasha and Enkil to Louis and Claudia when Louis suggests Greece as a place to go to and he mentions "those who must be kept" and Louis is like "Wait, what?" and Lestat is like "Oh never mind".

This show is wonderful and I can't wait for S2.

Onto THE MAYFAIR WITCHES in January!

EDIT:

Oh and a few things about how brilliant this show is.

Spoiler

Okay, so the Armand reveal was done like a horror movie. He's 100% manipulating Louis with the mind gift, and maybe aways has been. What if....what if requesting Daniel to come interview him again and PURPOSELY changing how he tells the story is a cry for help, and Armand has him trapped? What if....what if the whole thing is an attempt to get Daniel to find him his true love, Lestat?

Goddamn the layers of this show are impressive.

But yeah, the Armand reveal was definitely meant to be unsettling...and show that Louis is not okay.

And the pages of Claudia's diary being CLEANLY sliced out VS torn out of her earlier diaries? Telling.

In the books Armand is a MASTER of the Mind Gift, so I'm now thinking that Louis is his prisoner.

This post has been edited by QuickTidal: 09 November 2022 - 03:40 PM

[Lady Bliss]

Oh I must watch this! I didn’t realize it was already out. Now I can just binge :-)

[QuickTidal]

Lady Bliss, on 09 November 2022 - 03:29 PM, said:

Oh I must watch this! I didn’t realize it was already out. Now I can just binge :-)

I hope you like it. I'm a big fan of the books, and the movie, but this show is on another level entirely with its storytelling.

[Tsundoku]

So hopeful but so fearful .. please be good. Looks like they've not stinted on the budget though.

[QuickTidal]

If there is anyone who I faith faith to do an Addam's Family spinoff justice, it's Tim Burton. The man's whole career is based off this stuff. I'm excited for it.

[Primateus]

Kevin Conroy, it seems, has died.

[Tiste Simeon]

Finished watching a show called Derry Girls and honestly it's one of the funniest and heart warming shows I've ever seen. The finale was utterly hilarious and massively emotional. Hugely recommended.

[amphibian]

I haven't seen the new season yet, but I genuinely love the writing and the willingness of the actors to be weird.

Uncle Colm gets me giggling every single time.

[Tiste Simeon]

Oh yes the guy played Uncle Colm to absolute perfection haha

[QuickTidal]

Season 5 of THE CROWN has been surprisingly good.

Imelda Staunton and Jonathan Pryce have been decent, if imperfect versions of the Queen and Phillip. It takes Staunton at least 3 episodes to get anywhere near the performances of Olivia Colman, to stay nothing of Claire Foy. But she does get there eventually.

Pryce is fine, and feels like a solid progression from Menzies.

The holdout on performance was Domenic West's portrayal of Charles. Josh O'Connor nailed Charles so well that anyone who followed him was going to struggle, but West doesn't even attempt "the voice" at first and is just being Domenic West....but around ep 4 I started to hear and see Charles in his performance.

Debicki is as close to Diana during these years as anyone could get. She's perfect in the role.

I like that the show doesn't shy away from not letting Diana off the hook for some of her behaviour. So many people treated her as this pedestal-untouchable woman who got down in the muck and played amongst the normal people...and hell even in the Bashir interview where she talks about not being prepared for the "system"....I'm sitting there like "Does this woman expect us to forget that she's the daughter of a goddamned Earl in a family of well off nobles that's been around since the 15th century and lived on an estate and is in the line of succession?" Like I feel like she put on such airs about being "the people's princess" while also being RICH AF and Noble already. She knew exactly what kind of life she was getting into. Did she enter a loveless marriage? Yes, and I feel for her...but this shit happens to everyone all the time in real life. The fact that it happened in the public eye should not be the thing that elevates this. Do I love Charles? Gods no, but I at least accept that his family prevented him from the love of his life and pushed him into said loveless marriage. And the proof is that the marriage to Diana lasted what? A decade? He's been with Camilla now for like 25+ years. It's clear to me that the mistake was not letting him choose Camilla back then, scandal or not.

I think the best episode of the season was the one that touched on the fall of the Soviet Union, and the Romanovs and the connections to the royal family therein. The whole season is peppered with "well the public thinks THIS", and the Queen is like "Actually, it's this"....and the end of this episode where they try to suggest that her grandmother Mary was jealous and said she didn't want to rescue the Romanovs from the Bolsheviks and get them out of Ipatiev House out of the notion that Alexandra was more beautiful and Mary felt threatened...when in reality (and in real life; the rivalry was invented for the show to mirror what was going on with Penny Knatchbull) the Queen states that it was more a worry over the political fallout from saving a German princess (during WWI) and an abdicated King.

Anyways, great episode.

The stuff that focuses on Charles and Diana is good, and having lived through it it's nice to watch a dramatization. I remember the Bashir interview, and I'm not at all surprised to find out how shady he was about it...that man is horrible.

We have two eps left, but I'm enjoying.

This post has been edited by QuickTidal: 24 November 2022 - 02:45 PM

[Tsundoku]

Quite enjoying Wednesday on Netflix so far.

Yes it's a little YA-ish and sort of like Harry-Potter lite, but it's fun. And it looks like the cast are having fun too.

I've never seen anything else Jenna Ortega has done, but she has real charisma in the role. It feels like a contradiction, but her portrayal of Wednesday just crackles.
Don't know how to explain it any other way. Some people might not like the - dare I say it? - tiny snippets of humanity that have been infused into her, but IMHO it doesn't detract from Wednesday's cold, logical, (psychopathic?) intensity. I think it enhances it.
Yes it's different, but not in a bad way.

My $0.02.

Further impressions of ep 5+ in spoiler tags because.

Spoiler

EDIT: ep 5, and there's a bit of a tonal shift, slightly jarring. Still ok but a bit different. Wednesday is a bit more emotive for a start, a bit too much IMHO.
I checked the wiki and this was a different director and writer after Tim Burton directed the first 4. Gough and Millar wrote ep 1-2 and Alpert wrote ep 3-4.
EDIT2: And now we've gone full teen-mystery a la Sabrina. Well, middle eps in a season are traditionally where you have to plow through some so-so stuff to get to more good bits. A few modernisms uncomfortably shoehorned in, in what seems to be some sort of "here's the requisite preachy bit" we get with a lot of recent shows, but not so much as to derail it, but it does detract a little. Not to say there aren't any ... ah ... modern references ... in the previous eps, as there were but they didn't stick out as much or detract from the flow, and felt more natural.
Huh, well the Shgeriff/Gomez antagonism got resolved quickly. Hopefully it's just a feint.
A new plotline with the siren chick out of the blue. So to speak. Seems a bit unnecessary, maybe to give her some character development.

Ep6
Um, so they're all friends now?

This post has been edited by Tsundoku: 27 November 2022 - 12:34 PM

[champ]

I enjoyed Wednesday, the lead is fantastic.

If you can ignore some of the YA you'll enjoy it! Shout out to the dance scene, best scene of the season! Plenty of easter eggs to spot too for fans of the films!

[QuickTidal]

champ, on 28 November 2022 - 07:54 PM, said:

I enjoyed Wednesday, the lead is fantastic.

If you can ignore some of the YA you'll enjoy it! Shout out to the dance scene, best scene of the season! Plenty of easter eggs to spot too for fans of the films!

Excited to check it out!

[TheRetiredBridgeburner]

QuickTidal, on 24 November 2022 - 02:42 PM, said:

Season 5 of THE CROWN has been surprisingly good.

Imelda Staunton and Jonathan Pryce have been decent, if imperfect versions of the Queen and Phillip. It takes Staunton at least 3 episodes to get anywhere near the performances of Olivia Colman, to stay nothing of Claire Foy. But she does get there eventually.

Pryce is fine, and feels like a solid progression from Menzies.

The holdout on performance was Domenic West's portrayal of Charles. Josh O'Connor nailed Charles so well that anyone who followed him was going to struggle, but West doesn't even attempt "the voice" at first and is just being Domenic West....but around ep 4 I started to hear and see Charles in his performance.

Debicki is as close to Diana during these years as anyone could get. She's perfect in the role.

I like that the show doesn't shy away from not letting Diana off the hook for some of her behaviour. So many people treated her as this pedestal-untouchable woman who got down in the muck and played amongst the normal people...and hell even in the Bashir interview where she talks about not being prepared for the "system"....I'm sitting there like "Does this woman expect us to forget that she's the daughter of a goddamned Earl in a family of well off nobles that's been around since the 15th century and lived on an estate and is in the line of succession?" Like I feel like she put on such airs about being "the people's princess" while also being RICH AF and Noble already. She knew exactly what kind of life she was getting into. Did she enter a loveless marriage? Yes, and I feel for her...but this shit happens to everyone all the time in real life. The fact that it happened in the public eye should not be the thing that elevates this. Do I love Charles? Gods no, but I at least accept that his family prevented him from the love of his life and pushed him into said loveless marriage. And the proof is that the marriage to Diana lasted what? A decade? He's been with Camilla now for like 25+ years. It's clear to me that the mistake was not letting him choose Camilla back then, scandal or not.

I think the best episode of the season was the one that touched on the fall of the Soviet Union, and the Romanovs and the connections to the royal family therein. The whole season is peppered with "well the public thinks THIS", and the Queen is like "Actually, it's this"....and the end of this episode where they try to suggest that her grandmother Mary was jealous and said she didn't want to rescue the Romanovs from the Bolsheviks and get them out of Ipatiev House out of the notion that Alexandra was more beautiful and Mary felt threatened...when in reality (and in real life; the rivalry was invented for the show to mirror what was going on with Penny Knatchbull) the Queen states that it was more a worry over the political fallout from saving a German princess (during WWI) and an abdicated King.

Anyways, great episode.

The stuff that focuses on Charles and Diana is good, and having lived through it it's nice to watch a dramatization. I remember the Bashir interview, and I'm not at all surprised to find out how shady he was about it...that man is horrible.

We have two eps left, but I'm enjoying.

I've actually given up on it (I watched one further episode past the Russia one), and it's shame because I enjoyed the first three series very much.

I liked the set up and most of the Romanov episode, but the portrayal of events at Ipatiev House felt gratuitously violent. It's hard to articulate it as I've definitely seen more graphic depictions in other things, it might have just jarred more because it felt so out of place in The Crown. It would have lost nothing for me if the last shot had been the gunman lining up in silhouette in front of the family, or ended on black with the sound of gunfire. There's no misinterpretation possible of what followed without needing to actually show it and hear everyone screaming.

Overall though I agree, Dominic West is a great Charles and grows with each episode (and I really liked Josh O'Connor as well), Debicki is a spot on Diana, and I feel very similarly to you in finding the saintly narrative with her a bit sickly so it was good to see some less than angelic behaviour shown. Jonathan Pryce is also excellent - he's got one of those voices I could listen to on loop all day. Unfortunately I think in terms of playing the Queen Claire Foy set an impossibly high bar that neither subsequent actress has met for me, despite them both being very good.

Some of it I think has been natural progression for me in that I enjoyed the fourth season less than the third, and so on. Glad you are enjoying it though

This post has been edited by TheRetiredBridgeburner: 29 November 2022 - 10:00 AM

[QuickTidal]

TheRetiredBridgeburner, on 29 November 2022 - 09:58 AM, said:

Unfortunately I think in terms of playing the Queen Claire Foy set an impossibly high bar that neither subsequent actress has met for me, despite them both being very good.

1000%. My wife has commented on both Olivia and Imelda's takes and said they simply cannot measure up to what Claire brought to the table in S1 and 2.

you're not missing too much in the remaining episodes. They do the Bashir interview and lay out up against the Gunpowder Plot (due to it being recorded on Nov 5th)...and the only really good thing is that they show Bashir as the grasping, shady POS he always was and show that Diana regretted it after when she realized that people were going to view her poorly. They then spend time showing us how the Royals getting an actual divorce had to happen in the same courtroom as most other divorces by juxtaposing it against 3 other couples who had bad marriages, which I have to admit was a WEIRD ass way to play it. I think Peter Morgan is too much of a Royal-fan to get out from under his own bias sometimes. I don't need Charles and Diana's divorce normalized as if I imagined that it happened on some higher plane...of course it happens like other divorces. And the last ep is the decommissioning of the royal yacht that the first ep focused on, juxtaposed against Charles being sent to Hong Kong for the handover to China, the yacht's final trip. What really blew my mind about that episode is they spend like the last 5 minutes with Elizabeth reverently walking around the yacht for one last time to "say good-bye"...and my wife was like "Oh, did they dismantle it?" and I was staring at the show incredulous and said "No, it's docked permanently in Edinburgh, and is now a tourist attraction."....the episode wants you to feel INTENSELY sad that the boat is being decommissioned and acts very much like it will be destroyed....so when Liz is walking around touching it so gingerly I'm like "Lady, it ain't gone...you can go see it anytime you want for 18.5 pounds!"

Jaysus.

[stone monkey]

Watching The Peripheral on Amazon. The book is great, the show, not so much.

It started off moderately well in the first couple of episodes, but quickly dropped off a cliff in quality afterwards. I get the feeling that the writers weren't terribly interested in the economic warfare/social engineering aspect of the plot (which was imo one of the more interesting aspects of the book), and just seem to be more concerned with regular doses of interpersonal violence. They've also woefully miscast Inspector Lowbeer (after making us wait far too long for her to show up). The actor playing her is doing one of the worst English accents imaginable; she pronounces all sorts of words completely incorrectly (very posh Brits absolutely do not pronounce "institute" like that). Her dialogue coach, if she had one, has really dropped the ball on that one. I find myself wincing every time she drops an American pronunciation, like a hand grenade, into the middle of a sentence that is supposed to sound like cut-glass English.

I get that when adapting a book for television, you have to make choices, excisions and additions, but I'm inescapably reminded of the old adage: "It is both original and good; what is good is not original, and what is original is not good." Most of the cast are working manfully with their roles, such as they are, but it's really to no avail because the writing is so awful.

It's a shame, because I enjoyed the book greatly, and and was looking forward to seeing what could be done with it. And it's obvious that a fair bit of cash was dropped on it because the technical aspects (set design, effects etc, especially in London) look fantastic.

This post has been edited by stone monkey: 29 November 2022 - 08:09 PM

[worry]

6 eps into Our Flag Means Death and I'm really liking it. It's not laugh a minute like What We Do In the Shadows, but the entire cast is still very good and amiable, and I just click with Rhys Darby's sense of humor. Ewen Bremner as the mate Buttons is SO good and completely unrecognizable.

[QuickTidal]

The WILLOW tv show starts on Disney+ today!

I love that his real life daughter Anabelle is playing Willow's grown up daughter Mims. And seeing Joanne Whalley reprise Sorsha will be a joy....I had SUCH a crush and I loved her in the first film...and I'm curious what they will tell us about what happened to Madmartigan.

I'm also intensely curious who is playing Elora and what her part in the narrative will be, she's obviously of age to have taken control as Empress of Air Asleen, but it seems like Sorsha is still in charge...so where's Elora Danan?

[QuickTidal]

Really enjoyed the first two eps of WILLOW on Disney+.

Spoiler

Not stringing us along about who Elora was is a really nice thing. Kasdan knows that would have just annoyed us (I'm looking at you Sauron on RoP).

I like Boorman a lot, and he definitely feels like the Madmartigan insert for this group.

Willow was fantastic, as I expected Warwick is always class....but it was also so lovely to see his daughter (IRL and on the show) Mims has grown up to be much like her dad. Willow sad face when someone mentioned Ranon makes me think that Ranon and Kaiya are no longer with us.

Kit and Airk (named after Madmartigan's friend form the movie I assume) were both great, and feel like a perfect split between Sorsha's personality and Mads...Speaking of Kit, a front and centre LGBTQ relationship that is not treated as an outlier and just "IS"....glad Disney is finally doing that.

The other characters haven't done TOO much yet, but I like the dude playing Graydon a lot too.

I know the Brownies are showing up, so can't wait for Kevin Pollak and Rick Overton to reprise their roles as Rool and Franjean!

I like the notion that Bavmorda was (in her search for power and the destruction of Elora/the Prohpecy) was digging into something deeper and scarier and much more threatening to the world.

I miss Mads, and I HOPE there's some Kilmer cameo...I know they said he was involved till he had to pul out last minute...but I can hope.

Joanne Whalley is exactly as I remember her as Sorsha, just older. The bits of Horner music they inserted when she whipped out her familiar sword? Amazing.

Really excited to see where this goes. It's hitting all the right notes for me so far.