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Post by Jay on Feb 27, 2021 11:03:42 GMT -8
I was thinking of maybe saving mention of it until Prince Philip finally kicked the bucket but lord knows how long that will take so I've been watching The Crown and I can't say it's diminished any of my long-standing antipathy towards the ruling class. That's not to say that they're entirely unredeemable and there are a few characters you can feel for, but AS AN AMERICAN (or sort of one), I feel I must get saucy about all this preening and talk of credentials and breeding amidst ignorance and bad behaviour. Also they got like a season in before attempting to acknowledge Edward VIII's / Prince Philip's adjacency to Nazis.
There's much to appreciate though, in that the sets are without-needing-to-say-it, great, the Hans Zimmer score brings in a lot of dignity and tragedy, and the series thus far has artfully handled a lot of the the "show don't tell" dictum in that it would be very very easy to have characters pronouncing judgments upon each other non-stop and it mostly doesn't happen, and when it does (Edward VIII again) it comes off as petty. The episodes themselves are also pretty clean, either circling an opening image with a closing one or bundling in a bunch of thematically similar ideas to make more of a point than real life often affords us. I don't think it really hit its stride until the ninth episode of the first season, but Churchill as played by John Lithgow was consistently good and they succeeded in rendering George VI as the man who had no taste for all these responsibilities but bore them until they broke him.
Other thoughts: Margaret is emotionally immature but hot, Philip is played on the bleeding edge of charming and boorish and might be one of the show's more fascinating characters for that reason since he fancies himself as more modern than he actually is, Claire Foy is the British Zooey Deschanel (minus the bangs, you know I'm right)
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Post by guttersnipe on Feb 27, 2021 15:23:22 GMT -8
I was thinking of maybe saving mention of it until Prince Philip finally kicked the bucket but lord knows how long that will take so I've been watching The Crown and I can't say it's diminished any of my long-standing antipathy towards the ruling class. That's not to say that they're entirely unredeemable and there are a few characters you can feel for, but AS AN AMERICAN (or sort of one), I feel I must get saucy about all this preening and talk of credentials and breeding amidst ignorance and bad behaviour. Also they got like a season in before attempting to acknowledge Edward VIII's / Prince Philip's adjacency to Nazis. Well, you lot did get rid of them and everything. Decolonisation everywhere took its cue from one unlikely upstart nation's decision to couch its idea of freedom in the claim that landed gentry was antithetical to the American Dream. In other news, I have never seen The Crown, and I'm slightly disappointed that my best friend is a fan (though I would never voice that, especially as it makes my defence of cinema made by highly questionable people deeply hypocritical). |
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Post by Jeremy on Feb 27, 2021 16:48:48 GMT -8
The Crown is undeniably a handsome show (that $10 million-per-episode budget has to go somewhere), and I give it credit for bucking the Netflix trend and producing episodes that feel like episodes, rather than formless chapters of a bloated whole. But the themes often feel heavy-handed and the show can drag in its stuffy blend of operatic drama and period flair. The storylines with the royal family are usually interesting; the material centering on Parliament tends to be less so.
I believe episode 1x09 was my favorite of Season One as well; John Lithgow made a great Churchill, and brings a lot to the show with his bluster and apathy towards the Queen. (The show could've benefited a similar character in S2 or S3, but sadly Thatcher was a few decades off.) The best episodes tend to be the individual character spotlights, though even those can veer uncomfortably into Emmy-bait territory.
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Post by Jay on Mar 1, 2021 11:22:30 GMT -8
I think I can see why your friend is into it, 'Snipe, because The Crown is very very polished on the level of pure craft. Self-consciously so. I've had a number of conversations with writers over the years as to whether it's a good thing or a bad thing to show off that level of technical finesse or if there should be some loosening of the seams. I suppose musicians have the same talk (Thelonious Monk!). Watching The Crown, there's no real wiggle room. Every episode is dense in its thematics and risks coming off heavy-handed as a result of that. For example, the one last night I was watching had three or four competing storylines: The A-line was that Princess Margaret was getting sad once more over her unmarried status and briefly accepted a haphazard proposal from a lout who served as a royal photography assistant, and this transitioned into her nearly hooking up with an outsider artistic photographer type (who promptly spent too much of the episode playing mindgames with her). The B-line was that Elizabeth and Philip, having gone through marital troubles the previous eps while Phil was away, were now celebrating their tenth anniversary and trying to make it water under the bridge. The C-Plot was that the newly-minted Prime Minister Macmillan was dealing with his wife's decades-long affair and overheard a contemptuous phone call to her lover. It's all so densely woven around this concept of relationship troubles that it felt forced and inorganic even as it strove for a sort of realism. Sometimes the tension is compelling in that a whole lot of pomp and polish on display while the main characters are debating whether Antarctica is in the north or south. The boring dialogue and the mundanity of the storylines is at odds with the perfection that is the presentation. But lately, I've been more aware of the limitations of the scope and that the series title means what it says: We don't learn about Eden's opiate issues until he's PM, ditto Macmillan's trouble with his wife, and where Group Captain Townsend is now is anyone's guess. The show is only interested in those who are in direct orbit of the crown and each episode is made up to be some watershed moment.
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Post by otherscott on Mar 1, 2021 14:07:14 GMT -8
I'm early in the second season and starting to see some of the dark comedic elements of The Boys (especially anything involving The Deep), and it's done more interesting things with Homelander than I expected. I actually think Butcher himself is a really annoying, not all that interesting character, but I can see how people might gravitate towards him. He's got a little bit of Rorschach-ness to him, and I never really like Rorschach either for similar reasons. I do think the show has generally gotten better as it's gone along outside of Butcher though.
"Dark Quiet Death" is one of the best episodes I've seen that was made in 2020, and I'm not really sure I saw such a touching standalone coming from Mythic Quest based on what its first four episodes were. I really loved it.
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Post by Jeremy on Mar 1, 2021 14:23:47 GMT -8
"Dark Quiet Death" is such a radical departure from the previous Mythic Quest episodes, yet it works excellently. A remarkable standalone episode - though I've heard some argue that the quarantine episode was even better.
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Post by otherscott on Mar 5, 2021 14:18:54 GMT -8
I finished Homecoming season 2, and while I did really enjoy the way the season was structured and directed, as well as the acting performances, I think it hid some pretty major shortcomings in the plot.
There just wasn't anything interesting about this season, aside from the entire framing of it. It was a compelling mystery for the first 3 or 4 episodes, but you pretty quickly figured out what happened and why somewhere by the end of Episode 4. Then, the finale had that one major twist to it, except to me the most interesting part of that twist is not the twist itself, but the follow up to it. It makes no sense to me that where they ended it was the destination rather than an inciting incident leading to something else, something that would be more character driven and at least somewhat unique. Especially since there does not seem to be plans for a season 3.
So I think this was a step up on the things Homecoming already did very well, but the weaknesses in this show can be quite glaring at times.
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Post by Incandescence 112 on Mar 5, 2021 15:33:44 GMT -8
I finished Homecoming season 2, and while I did really enjoy the way the season was structured and directed, as well as the acting performances, I think it hid some pretty major shortcomings in the plot. So I think this was a step up on the things Homecoming already did very well, but the weaknesses in this show can be quite glaring at times. You summed up Mr. Robot rather well. |
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Post by Jeremy on Mar 6, 2021 21:01:33 GMT -8
I think Homecoming Season 2 would have worked better as a movie than a show. It's already pretty short for a TV season (about 3.5 hours total) and could have benefited by trimming some of the runtime in the season's latter half. In fairness, it's probably about as good a second season as the show could have produced, given the circumstances - following up a standalone story, no Julia Roberts - but it still never fully justifies its existence as it should. (Unless the writers are planning a third season, which I'm not clear on.)
In any case, it is undoubtedly the best production of 2020 where Janelle Monáe wakes up in a strange place and we need to piece together how she got there.
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Post by Incandescence 112 on Mar 22, 2021 17:16:29 GMT -8
So it turns out the Justified creative team is taking on a new Elmore Leonard novel. They have a lot to live up to...but I am sold.
So when do we get a Wynn Duffy spinoff?
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Post by Jay on Mar 27, 2021 17:21:47 GMT -8
I've wrapped my to-date consumption of The Crown with eyes ahead to a future series where we get Jonathan Pryce as Philip HELL YEAH. I think that it would be easy to focus on the high production values, what with the costumes and set designs or failing that, my regular game of "spot the corgis," but I think its gift is as a character study concerning various player's myopic worldviews and how one is frequently challenged to sympathize with them while still finding the materialism and prejudice repugnant. It's also interesting to see how they've developed and what they've done with the changed up casts from the first two series to the next two. In the first series, Matt Smith played Philip like the over-the-pond equivalent of some country clubber with a polo shirt and shorts whose dad owned a dealership, but Tobias Menzies by contrast is always impeccably dressed, neither works out nor sweats so far as we can tell, and has a less whiny voice, such that you live to hear him enunciate whatever remarks however wise or specious. Claire Foy as Elizabeth got caught up in some of the big blue-eyed expectations suddenly thrust upon you bewilderment, yet Olivia Colman continues that in a less obvious way being mostly uncurious and emotionally oblivious while retaining the good nature. They're still the same in many respects, but shaded differently and as a viewing conceit I find it strangely compelling.
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Post by ThirdMan on Mar 28, 2021 16:55:09 GMT -8
Well, I got a discount on one-month of HBO and Crave TV (streaming service in Canada), so it looks like I'll be able to check out Search Party, I May Destroy You, Lovecraft Country, etc., before I cancel after 29 days. Watched Zack Snyder's Justice League, to get it out of the way/be in on the conversation (yeah, more character-development than the original cut, but still an overblown, murky-grey CGI-fest with mostly mediocre dialogue).
ETA: Hmmm. Turns out it might be a three-month discount. At any rate, we'll see how much content I can get through in a month.
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Post by otherscott on Mar 29, 2021 15:35:29 GMT -8
Finished a few things recently:
Lupin: This one wasn't really worth the fuss for me, it's a fairly straight forward heist show but most of the plot lines felt very well trodden and the characters didn't quite meet the requirement of making me care much about them or the mystery involved.
Deadwood Season 2: Still not quite worthy of its place next to The Wire and The Sopranos as part of HBOs holy trinity in my mind (I'd happily replace it with The Leftovers), but this season was an improvement on season 1 and I really did enjoy the rhythms of the episodes and the storylines. I was suprised Seth Bullock took as much of a backseat as he did in this season, but I didn't feel like it was much of a loss. Anna Gunn is just all around a terrific actress and I don't know why she doesn't get more work, maybe there's only certain colder roles she excels in and they just aren't around frequently enough?
Mythic Quest: Raven's Banquet: Other than "Dark Quiet Death", the most notable thing about this show is the energy brought to this by Charlotte Nicdao, who really makes herself into an unlikely audience proxy despite having a sort of mania that you usually see in the part of a side character. The writing is nothing spectacular, and it's not as funny as it wants to be, but I will happily watch more seasons of this.
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Post by Jeremy on Mar 30, 2021 7:22:18 GMT -8
Well, I got a discount on one-month of HBO and Crave TV (streaming service in Canada), so it looks like I'll be able to check out Search Party, I May Destroy You, Lovecraft Country, etc., before I cancel after 29 days. Watched Zack Snyder's Justice League, to get it out of the way/be in on the conversation (yeah, more character-development than the original cut, but still an overblown, murky-grey CGI-fest with mostly mediocre dialogue). ETA: Hmmm. Turns out it might be a three-month discount. At any rate, we'll see how much content I can get through in a month. A quick Google search tells me it is a three-month discount. Pretty cool; an upside of so many streaming services means an abundance of discounts. True enough about the Snyder cut, though I certainly think it has a lot more merit than the theatrical version; I might write a little more about that when I have the time. (Been a busy few weeks.) Anna Gunn is just all around a terrific actress and I don't know why she doesn't get more work, maybe there's only certain colder roles she excels in and they just aren't around frequently enough? I feel like Gunn's Breaking Bad role may have hurt her career a bit, even if she did pick up a couple of Emmys for it. Partly due to the fan backlash, but also because it's tough to get out of the typecasting bubble when you're so closely associated with such a hit show. (Bryan Cranston has done better, though that may be by virtue of being Bryan Cranston.) |
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Post by Incandescence 112 on Mar 30, 2021 10:50:19 GMT -8
Anna Gunn is just all around a terrific actress and I don't know why she doesn't get more work, maybe there's only certain colder roles she excels in and they just aren't around frequently enough? I feel like Gunn's Breaking Bad role may have hurt her career a bit, even if she did pick up a couple of Emmys for it. Partly due to the fan backlash, but also because it's tough to get out of the typecasting bubble when you're so closely associated with such a hit show. (Bryan Cranston has done better, though that may be by virtue of being Bryan Cranston.) At least Gilligan and co. took note of the (unjustified, Walt was a bastard and completely in the wrong) backlash to her and created Kim Wexler. And though I didn't mind Skyler, Kim is a much richer character all around. |
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