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Post by Jay on Aug 8, 2022 9:24:26 GMT -8
I finished Slow Horses several days ago, and it's apparently having a second part release in the fall followed by two more seasons, which seems ambitious, but the fella's written eleven books already in the series so why not? The first series did an okay job of establishing the characters although I'm disappointed to report that there was a damsel-in-distress that moved the plotlines in parts. What I found compelling overall, particularly in this moment, was that the focus was not on foreign terrorists but domestic right-wing ones that the agency was trying to anticipate and quash, although not always with good intentions in mind. The only other bit of "haven't seen this before" is the rapid-fire poop and fart jokes emanating from Gary Oldman's character, who is a very competent spy, but otherwise with a crass demeanor that he uses to disarm his peers and competitors. It's surprisingly funny, that aside, for spy fare. My only pause is that the next season's teaser invoked "sleeper agents" and I'm having flashbacks to 24. Also AppleTV, etc.
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Post by Jeremy on Aug 19, 2022 14:32:49 GMT -8
For All Mankind wrapped up its third season last week. I've grown to admire this show's ambition and ability to keep so many plates in the air at once, for characters both on Earth and those jetting constantly into space. I like the way the series combines many of the best aspects of Halt and Catch Fire and Battlestar Galactica, weaving stories of idealistic futurists who are constantly embattled by the harsh realities of cold deep space. And I'm quite impressed with how the first two seasons each build in tension and quality, with finales that wrap up their storylines in impressive and delicate ways.
The third season has many of these same attributes, and it's more ambitious than ever. But unfortunately, it also has a fair deal of weaknesses - many of which became apparent in the finale, where several of the plates the show was juggling all season crashed to the ground. It was a thoroughly mediocre and frustrating episode that retroactively lowered the quality of the whole season.
BRIEF AND RANTY SPOILERS BELOW
Despite being an 82-minute finale, much of what occurs at season's end feels weirdly rushed and undernourished. We're introduced to the stranded North Korean astronaut, who plays a prominent and interesting role in the first 30 minutes, but then he's just... pretty much forgotten about? Then we get the harebrained plan to fly Kelly up to the orbiting ship using her own spacesuit's thrusters as a booster, which is hyped up as being potentially deadly, only for the actual moment of rescue to be offscreen, and for Ed - a man in his sixties - to inexplicably walk away without a scratch? Meanwhile, the wrong-headed Danny Stevens storyline (how does nobody see how obviously unfit he is for the mission?) ends on a wrong-headed whimper, with him and Ed parting on almost cordial terms. And brother Jimmy's storyline, underbaked as it has been in prior episodes, now serves simply to give the season the sad ending that it for some reason requires. Karen's death is about as cheap as it gets (one of the show's best characters - and certainly one of its best-developed - falls victim to "wrong place, wrong time" syndrome. And Molly, who has pretty much been absent the whole season, returns just in time to make a hero's exit, which feels less like a fitting close to her arc than an admission on the part of the writers that they don't know what to do with her anymore. There was simply too many threads for the season to navigate (I haven't even mentioned the Ellen or Margo/Aleida stories), and the finale could not achieve liftoff.
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Post by Jay on Aug 28, 2022 11:14:33 GMT -8
Having finally wrested myself from the grip of TWD, not entirely on purpose, Remember the 80s? Stranger Things has become the show for me that everyone else watches and I find regularly wanting. I shotgunned half the season last weekend while nursing a head cold and finished the rest including a two-and-a-half hour finale during the rest of the week. It's wild to me to watch what makes it into the consciousness of the period and what doesn't, as we seem to have two prominent LGBTQ+ characters in the cast, and yet while they worry about the social scorn of coming out, there's no mention of AIDS whatsoever. Wino manages to keep a big house despite being a single mom of two or more kids, though she routinely absconds from both parenting and job duties (she was selling Britannicas by phone this season!), yet never seems at risk of financial or familial ruin. Most of the plot points seem to be volunteered by the Brothers Duffer on a "HEY WOULDN'T IT BE COOL IF...?" basis, and they seem to add characters randomly to either fill gaps in the cast, drum up artificial sympathy or antagonism, or provide vapid comic relief, as in the case of Argyle, who is basically Shaggy but without a Great Dane or outlandish eating habits (or at least his ends in pineapple on pizza). But hey, at least we got D&D and the Satanic Panic this season? Otherwise, not much doing. Much fan service, not much self-awareness.
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Post by otherscott on Aug 29, 2022 4:59:06 GMT -8
For All Mankind spoilers:
I still believe there's some value to the "out of left field" death, so I appreciate how Karen Baldwin went out. This was clearly supposed to be a tragedy, so I don't have a problem with a wrong place, wrong time death with a character that there was still meat on the bone. I think they paid off Molly Cobb just fine, though it is obvious that they had nothing left to do with her. I still prefer the Molly Cobb approach to storytelling when they just drop her and bring her back for a heroic death rather than The Americans Nina method of spinning their wheels for a season and a half with plotlines that lead nowhere.
I thought the Houston bombing and Jimmy storyline as a whole was fine. I thought it was crafted fairly well, they didn't spend very much time on it but let us know this WAS a thing that would pay off. I think spending more time on it would have been bad, Jimmy isn't that interesting.
The weak point of the season was definitely Danny. I think he was set up alright in the first 3 episodes but he felt more like a force for chaos than a real character. I didn't find the storyline with the Mars explosion good at all (that was my least favourite episode) and I don't think the payoff was right either here in this finale. The season as a whole was a little bit messy with characters doing things that create the most drama rather than believable things you'd expect intelligent people to do. I am more than okay with forgiving messiness if the season as a whole works for me and captivates me, which For All Mankind does, but I think that has to change.
In all I really liked this season and it will rank high on the end of my season list, but a lot of that is due to with built up goodwill for the characters from previous seasons that makes the dramatic moments feel very impactful, and that more than overrides the qualms I have. I think if the seasons continue to be on this level of messiness that goodwill can fade very quickly.
I will be very disappointed if Ed comes back in anything more than a guest grandfather type role. I still think there's another season of intrigue for Dani and Margo, and of course Aleida I think will be the connecting tissue for the whole show. That being said, we're running out of season 1 characters that make this whole thing work, and the characters they have introduced since then have not quite been on that level. The show needs to rectify that problem quickly. In short, still very happy with For All Mankind in the short term, worried in the long term.
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Aug 30, 2022 9:08:39 GMT -8
Anything I should watch this week on Max before my subscription expires? Irma Vep has been on my watchlist for a while. (Hell, maybe I should just do a Wong Kar-wai binge.)
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Post by Jeremy on Aug 30, 2022 16:47:17 GMT -8
For All Mankind spoilers: I thought it was crafted fairly well, they didn't spend very much time on it but let us know this WAS a thing that would pay off. I think spending more time on it would have been bad, Jimmy isn't that interesting.
That's a self-inflicted problem for the series, though. Jimmy isn't an interesting or compelling character, yet the show chooses to make him the center of one of the season's most important storylines... and then doesn't spend proper time building up that storyline before the climax. The finale as a whole felt like the writers rushing to complete their homework before deadline, with that arc suffering more than most. And yeah, I think there can be merit to sudden character deaths, but For All Mankind has usually been quite good at wringing genuine emotion out of those deaths - killing beloved characters in ways that are heartbreaking yet make sense for the story - and these felt thoroughly hollow and artificial in a Season Finale fashion. And thanks to the time jump (I'm really starting to hate those), we don't even have proper time to absorb it.The show's long-term problem at this stage is that it hasn't done a good job building its second generation of characters - the only compelling young regulars at this point are Kelly and Aleida. And as the original characters get older - and their prosthetics become increasingly more ridiculous - the suspension of disbelief stretches way beyond the extremes of space travel.
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Post by Jeremy on Aug 30, 2022 16:52:50 GMT -8
Anything I should watch this week on Max before my subscription expires? Irma Vep has been on my watchlist for a while. (Hell, maybe I should just do a Wong Kar-wai binge.) Check out The White Lotus. It's a really good, dark, funny social satire with a top-tier cast. And even if you don't like it, you can rant about it when it cleans up at the Emmys next month.
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Post by otherscott on Aug 31, 2022 5:45:57 GMT -8
The show's long-term problem at this stage is that it hasn't done a good job building its second generation of characters - the only compelling young regulars at this point are Kelly and Aleida. And as the original characters get older - and their prosthetics become increasingly more ridiculous - the suspension of disbelief stretches way beyond the extremes of space travel. Definitely agree with this part, and I don't think Kelly is that interesting either. They basically need to keep Margo and Danielle in large roles for next season because the cupboard is a bit bare otherwise. I typically like Ellen but I feel like her story has run its course. What they were doing with Danny didn't work. I get what they were going for, the generational rot of Stevens self destructiveness, but Danny just didn't have the redeeming qualities or the approachability that Gordo did to make him anything but detestable as a character. And you can't build a show around characters you detest. If they want to make this run 5 or 6 seasons they need to do a much better job with new generation secondary characters. They only have one season to make that work, because this is the last season for anyone who was an adult in Season 1. I think they're capable of it, but they need to show me. Quiara, definitely second the recommendation of The White Lotus.
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Post by Incandescence 112 on Sept 10, 2022 11:47:03 GMT -8
So, The Rings of Power is a bit of a disappointment. It's neither as bad as feared nor as good as I'd hope from a Tolkien adaptation with this much behind it. Essentially, the series is filling in the gaps of The Second Age and the events leading up to Sauron's return and the War of the Last Alliance, one of the sparsest periods of the Tolkien legendarium. But thus far, the show hasn't mined any real drama out of it, which is necessary when your story has a foregone conclusion. People who complain that Jackson's films were too stodgy and lacked real human characters (which I've never really understood, but to each their own) won't find those complaints assuaged here.
Another disappointment--Season 4 of What We Do in the Shadows feels like the show is running on fumes at this point. The attempts at pathos don't work or fit with the show's style, the attempts at over-arching stories crowds out the slice-of-life feel that made Seasons 1-3 special, and it hits the big ol' reset button at the end. We've got two more seasons at least of this--hopefully the ship can be righted before we enter The Office S8 territory.
On the positive side, I've been re-watching Mad Men....and I think I love Mad Men now? Though it contains more than a few sledgehammer-to-the-forehead moments and a few extraneous side plots and characters (and the 1st two seasons are the strongest, despite 6 and 7B being excellent as well), I think the overall richness of it more than makes up for those deficiencies. In addition, the main cast may be unlikable, but they remain human and 3-dimensional every step of the way, and that's what counts. AMC's produced some great stuff. I prefer the quartet of Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul/Mad Men/Halt and Catch Fire to the big HBO quartet of The Wire/The Sopranos/Deadwood/The Leftovers.
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Post by ThirdMan on Sept 10, 2022 17:48:59 GMT -8
I have experienced no such issues with Season 4 of What We Do In The Shadows. To me, it continues to hum along just as it did before. The reset button was inevitable on that particular story thread, and was more about exploring Lazlo's paternal side than anything else. That aside, though Nandor has been revealed as more and more of a self-centered asshole over time -- his blithe, careless treatment of Marwa was especially meanspirited -- I'm enjoying the work of all the cast members (Matt Berry and Harvey Guillen have been especially great) as much as ever. The Night Market was probably my favourite episode of the season, though that home-reno show parody was pretty inspired. and Private School was a terrifically outlandish bottle episode. Anyways, two more seasons seems about right for (still) one of the best live-action comedies on TV.
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Post by Jeremy on Sept 11, 2022 10:31:57 GMT -8
I'm enjoying WWDITS a lot this season, and it's still doing what it does best. That said, this will probably be the first time since the show's debut where it will not make my Top 10 at end of year. The series is still clever and funny, but largely for the same reasons as earlier years, and it's settled into its groove enough that I'm content to keep watching without expecting it to outdo itself every season. Plus, there have been a lot of other great shows airing in 2022, some of which are more interesting to watch each week and which leap more immediately to the forefront when I think of the current season's cream of the crop.
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Post by ThirdMan on Sept 11, 2022 13:59:38 GMT -8
Which shows? Because not very many new series look all that interesting to me right now. But that may just be a personal preference thing, or me not having certain channels/streaming services.
Re: streaming services, though, Disney Plus is being offered for $1.99 right now in Canada, so I got that, but am only going to watch the last six episodes of WandaVision (that I hadn't seen), Lightyear, Prey, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and perhaps give Avengers: Infinity War/Endgame and Thor: Ragnarok a second look. I've already watched Chip 'N' Dale: Rescue Rangers, which was cute. Might indulge Loki, but there's really not a whole heck of a lot on the service that I haven't seen and/or want to watch, and will most certainly cancel before the month is up. Also, I'm having some annoying sound issues with Disney Plus (a crackle/pop sound, and some minor breaking up, at times) on my PS4 that I haven't experienced with Netflix or Amazon Prime, which both use Dolby Atmos as well. Don't know what that's about, but rebooting my modem/resetting the app/changing the download bitrate hasn't resolved the issue. So that's yet another reason I won't stick with the service.
On another note, speaking of series that are perhaps running on fumes, Cobra-Kai (a very easy-to-watch series) doesn't seem to be breaking any new ground this year. Some folks absolutely love that show, but it's never been more than a mild diversion for me (aided in great part by the episodes being rather short, and the cast being generally endearing).
Anyways, I'm enjoying Harley Quinn and the now-returned Rick & Morty (which is equal parts funny and depressing, given how cynical it is) well enough, and am glad to see that Atlanta Season 4 (its final season!) will already begin airing this Thursday (it should be interesting to see if it has a more traditional structure -- relatively-speaking -- than S3).
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Post by Jeremy on Sept 11, 2022 17:38:14 GMT -8
Yeah, Disney+ is doing the $1.99/month deal in the US as well, as part of Disney Plus Day (which seems to jump around the calendar each year, but whatever). I've accepted by now that most of their shows are in the acceptably good and rarely great vein, with many of the series - notably the MCU and Star Wars shows - functioning as little more than brand extension. I may check out the new Cassian Andor series, but after Boba Fett and Kenobi, my excitement level for new Star Wars TV is pretty low.
Cobra Kai is a show I enjoyed a lot in its first season, in part because of how well it effectively humanized Johnny (I believe Sepinwall defined his character as "make karate great again"), but phased out of it somewhere in S2. Some shows just aren't built for the long haul, and many of the best dramas of recent years in particular seem to empty their bag of tricks after two or three seasons. I do appreciate the rise in half-hour dramas (i.e. episodes running no longer than 30-35 minutes), as a lot of 60-minute-plus episodes these days verge on laborious.
A lot of the best new shows in the past year have been on newer streaming services, notably Apple TV+ (which makes up in quality what it lacks in quantity) and HBO Max (which continues to produce great shows despite all the behind-the-scenes upheaval). Apple in particular has two of 2022's best new debuts (Severance and The Afterparty), plus several other new shows that display promise and artistic vision (I haven't fully connected with Pachinko and Shining Girls, but they're undeniably well-made series with distinct voices in a still-crowded landscape).
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Post by ThirdMan on Sept 11, 2022 19:17:19 GMT -8
A lot of the best new shows in the past year have been on newer streaming services, notably Apple TV+... Figured it had to be one of those. Anyways, I've seen the recent seasons of Barry and Hacks (which air on HBO Max, as well as HBO, in Barry's case), and they'd probably rate in my Top 10 for the year, were I to make one (which I won't be doing). (Yeah, I can't seem to sort out the sound issues on Disney Plus. Re-installed it, but I'm still getting some shaky audio. Oh well, guess it's technically inferior to Netflix, Amazon Prime, and HBO Max/Crave TV. Won't have it for much longer anyways.) And Lightyear was fine. Don't have too many issues with it. I mean, it's far-fetched that a mainstream (animated?) space adventure supposedly made in the early 90s (in Andy's world) would feature an overt relationship between two lesbians, or be as technologically-advanced, but whatever...
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Post by Jeremy on Sept 12, 2022 5:26:55 GMT -8
For the life of me, I cannot imagine any child - in 1995 or any other year - watching Lightyear and being inspired enough to crave an action figure of the title character. Buzz's "hero's journey" in the film is so limp and anticlimactic, and the film's tone is so sour (the real villain, we learn, is internal trauma) that I can only assume Andy just wasn't very a bright kid. Then again, he always did seem a bit overly obsessed with his toys.
Barry remains terrific and Hacks had a stellar second season. Curious if the latter show does well at the Emmys tonight - it seems to have something of the 30 Rock veneer, as a series that is not widely viewed by the general public, but is right up the alley of the folks in the TV biz.
I don't have any sound issues with Disney+, although they don't always pause their shows properly or adapt to full-screen mode on my laptop. Apple has similar issues, plus a tendency to reset to the beginning of an episode if I stop watching in the middle. You'd think these multi-billion dollar corporations would have a better grasp on how to create a proper streaming service (Netflix still has the best user experience, even if their content is largely mediocre).
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