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Post by ThirdMan on Jun 26, 2020 21:13:17 GMT -8
I've never watched a single episode of Due South. Must be my aversion to Mounties as some sort of Canadian symbol (I don't think I've encountered one, in full red costume, in person, in my entire 43 years on this Earth). Buddy-cop shows shows don't do much for me either.
I mean, right now I AM up to Episode 7 of Watchmen, which I'm enjoying, and that DOES feature some form of law-enforcement in its narrative. But obviously it works on a number of other levels (narratively, stylistically) beyond that. Thankfully, it's not as emotionally-overbearing as Lindelof's The Leftovers could sometimes be, but it IS pretty potent in some regards. Episode 6, in particular, was quite impressive. I gather this takes place about 20-30 years after the graphic-novel timeline, making it more of a sequel than anything, but I'll have to investigate further once I've completed the final three episodes.
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Post by guttersnipe on Jun 27, 2020 0:08:14 GMT -8
Ha! I'm watching Due South now as a comfort food sort of thing. Paul Gross? More like Paul Gorgeous. (The show itself is pretty fun too - weirdly, despite the salt-and-pepper buddy cop comedy it's trying to be, it makes me think more Northern Exposure + Sherlock? But less annoying than either.) Due South was strangely kind of a formative show for myself and a lot of my peers during the 90s - everyone seemed to follow it despite an acknowledgement that it probably wasn't a "great" show, but made up for most of its shortcomings with a lot of breezy charm - Diefenbaker's 'acting' and the theme song helped in that endeavour. Perhaps we were kinda rooting for Fraser as a kind of pseudo-British politenik working with and against American boorishness, or something. I don't think I saw any of the "new Ray" episodes, though I did see Callum Keith Rennie in... Twitch City, of course. I've never watched a single episode of Due South. Must be my aversion to Mounties as some sort of Canadian symbol (I don't think I've encountered one, in full red costume, in person, in my entire 43 years on this Earth). Buddy-cop shows shows don't do much for me either. The mountie get-up was the first non-airport uniform I encountered in Canada, but that's mainly because I made an immediate bee-line for the CN Tower, which had a gift shop full of mountie teddy bears. |
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Post by ThirdMan on Jun 27, 2020 2:56:34 GMT -8
Truth be told, I've probably been around them in some parades or something, but they're just not something I typically encounter in everyday life. Most police in Canada just dress in regular police uniforms.
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Post by Jeremy on Jun 27, 2020 20:00:35 GMT -8
I think I've only seen Canadian Mounties in old cartoons, like in Bugs Bunny ("Fresh Hare") or Droopy Dog ("Northwest Hounded Police"). I wasn't sure they were still a thing these days. (Never watched Due South.) I mean, right now I AM up to Episode 7 of Watchmen, which I'm enjoying, and that DOES feature some form of law-enforcement in its narrative. But obviously it works on a number of other levels (narratively, stylistically) beyond that. Thankfully, it's not as emotionally-overbearing as Lindelof's The Leftovers could sometimes be, but it IS pretty potent in some regards. Episode 6, in particular, was quite impressive. I gather this takes place about 20-30 years after the graphic-novel timeline, making it more of a sequel than anything, but I'll have to investigate further once I've completed the final three episodes. Yes, Watchmen follows the continuity of the 1985 comic, but jumps ahead to 2019. (Both are obviously "modern-day" for the times they were produced.) But I would hardly call it a cop show, since it explores plenty of elements beyond the typical police grind. And yeah, that sixth episode is pretty spectacular - probably one of my favorite eps of any Lindelof show. |
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Jun 30, 2020 11:15:50 GMT -8
Three guesses what show I started watching this week - the first two don't count.
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Post by Jeremy on Jun 30, 2020 12:04:36 GMT -8
Is it........ Bojack?
On a more serious note, I need to get HBO Max for a number of reasons, and your avatar-show is one of them.
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Jun 30, 2020 17:52:05 GMT -8
Is it........ Bojack? On a more serious note, I need to get HBO Max for a number of reasons, and your avatar-show is one of them.Why is it that Netflix has not one but two animated "adult" comedies with viscerally unpleasant art styles and leading women of color played by white actresses? And why does Big Mouth exist in the first place? Who is this show's target audience? |
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Post by ThirdMan on Jun 30, 2020 20:11:42 GMT -8
People who like dark, "naughty", irreverent humour? The characters (most certainly including the girls) also have a fair amount of dimension and complexity. Alan Sepinwall, the most well-known TV critic in North America, loves the show. But it's very filthy, and is naturally not going to appeal to those who are easily grossed-out.
And don't worry: they're currently in the process of weeding out every vocal performer in animated programs who is playing someone with a different racial background than their own. So Jenny Slate will no longer be playing half-black/half-white Missy. Bojack's done now, but I'm sure they'll eventually go back and overdub all of Alison Brie's work with that of a newly cast Vietnamese-American actress.
Also, they're currently on the lookout to find the appropriate 10-year old boy to re-record 30 years of Nancy Cartwright's Bart Simpson. They've got to record fast, though, before his voice changes.
The Equine Actors Guild has also FINALLY lodged a complaint against actor Will Arnett, not so much for Animal Appropriation, but for implying that horses are into bestiality.
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Post by Jeremy on Jun 30, 2020 20:32:43 GMT -8
Don't forget about Samurai Jack, who must have his lines (he has approximately six or seven of them throughout the series, I think) rerecorded by a Japanese actor.
Truth told, the controversy about actors voicing characters of different races has been brewing for a while. Raphael Bob-Waksberg actually apologized for casting a white woman as Diane a few years ago - his explanation was that he was trying to avoid the typical cliches associated with Asian women on TV, but he "went too far in the opposite direction." It's a delicate balance, you see.
And Jenny Slate has said that she assumed it was okay for her to voice Missy on Big Mouth because the character has a white Jewish mother, and Slate is herself white and Jewish. But she now realizes that this line of thinking only came about because of (in her own words) "unjust allowances made within a system of societal white supremacy." I'll bet you didn't know that the half-Jewish cartoon girl on Big Mouth was a byproduct of white supremacy, but now you do and you are smarter for it.
(As for Big Mouth itself, it does get a lot of critical praise for the way it develops its adolescent characters. But I personally just find it unfunny and repulsive.)
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Post by ThirdMan on Jun 30, 2020 21:01:12 GMT -8
Well, to be fair, Jeremy, a rather high percentage of Big Mouth revolves around discussions of an explicit sexual nature. And compared to most men your age, you're not all that comfortable with The Sex. So it would stand to reason that Big Mouth's content would not be palatable to you.
'Cuz I'm willing to bet that you were less put-off by the spurts of violence in, say, Pulp Fiction, than the extended banter comparing foot massages to oral sex. Heh.
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Post by Jeremy on Jul 1, 2020 7:48:18 GMT -8
I think it was an odd combination of things that put me off about Pulp Fiction, though I will say that only the sex stuff still puts me off to this day.
Gross-out humor in general has never been my forte, although I can enjoy it in the right context. (For instance, I thought last year's Booksmart, which was pretty heavy on crass, R-rated humor, managed to balance out its tone pretty well.)
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Jul 3, 2020 10:10:06 GMT -8
Three guesses what show I started watching this week - the first two don't count. So the third season of Search Party is probably best binged. But it's pretty damn good. Curiously, I found myself thinking about Better Call Saul a lot during this season, partially because Search Party has shifted into quirky courtroom drama, partially because so much of the season is about self-invention, but mostly because it's kind of hard to place why I find the show so endearing. (Oh, and much like BCS, there are some subplots that are mostly there for continuity reasons that aren't quite as compelling as the main plot. But that's a negative.) Alia Shawkat's descent into deeper and deeper psychopathy is really, really compelling, for starters. There are some really, really great laugh-out-loud setpieces (episode 8 is a particular standout). |
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Post by ThirdMan on Jul 3, 2020 15:27:18 GMT -8
Slowly working my way through Season 3 of Netflix's Dark, a German time-travel sci-fi drama. It's probably the most meticulous time-travel-related TV series or movie I've ever seen. Like, five generations of characters, top-drawer casting for the same characters across multiple ages, a refined visual style and clean geographical layout. The acting is uniformly strong, the paradoxes intriguing, the plot requiring a good deal of focus and concentration on the part of the viewer.
It's a pretty heavy series, which is why I'm taking my time with it, and it also took me an episode or two into S3 to get my bearings, after they introduced an alternate reality into an already-complicated time-travel premise. This certainly makes most other time-travel movies and TV shows seem hastily- and artlessly-assembled by comparison.
Worth noting is that the Netflix default setting is the English-dubbed version, but I immediately changed that to German with English subtitles. I'll sometimes allow English dubs with animation, but never with live-action programming.
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Post by Incandescence 112 on Jul 3, 2020 16:32:27 GMT -8
Slowly working my way through Season 3 of Netflix's Dark, a German time-travel sci-fi drama. It's probably the most meticulous time-travel-related TV series or movie I've ever seen. Like, five generations of characters, top-drawer casting for the same characters across multiple ages, a refined visual style and clean geographical layout. The acting is uniformly strong, the paradoxes intriguing, the plot requiring a good deal of focus and concentration on the part of the viewer. It's a pretty heavy series, which is why I'm taking my time with it, and it also took me an episode or two into S3 to get my bearings, after they introduced an alternate reality into an already-complicated time-travel premise. This certainly makes most other time-travel movies and TV shows seem hastily- and artlessly-assembled by comparison. Worth noting is that the Netflix default setting is the English-dubbed version, but I immediately changed that to German with English subtitles. I'll sometimes allow English dubs with animation, but never with live-action programming. Some reviewers said the Steins;gate dub was the best one around as far as anime goes. I couldn't stand it...That was the end of dubs for me. I've long been interested in Dark. It sounds like a smarter, deeper version of Stranger Things. I don't like time travel narratives. Most writers don't have a really good reason for doing so. So the fact that there's a show not named Steins;gate that actually gets it right is intriguing on its own. And I love sci-fi and small town dramas. Looking forward to watching it in German. |
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Post by ThirdMan on Jul 3, 2020 18:52:39 GMT -8
Though it's got a pretty convoluted plot, it's still very focused on developing character. The show doesn't have much humour, which will be a turn-off for some folks, but the quiet emphasis on characters and faces helps to mitigate some potential confusion w/r/t the plot. And as I mentioned earlier, there are a number of very-well-established locations -- a few distinct-looking homes, a power-plant, a cave, an isolated bus-stop, etc. -- that really help create continuity across multiple timelines. The show doesn't cater specifically to my sensibility, because I generally gravitate towards darkly-comedic dramas, but this is undeniably a handsomely-produced, very well-acted series, and well worth watching.
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