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Post by Incandescence 112 on Dec 7, 2018 23:03:29 GMT -8
I just finished the HBO Series Band of Brothers for the first time. It's now probably my favorite war story told in any medium, and one of the best constructed tv experiences ever. It's like if Saving Private Ryan maintained its quality all the way through. Even though the sheer number of characters could have easily overwhelmed this mini-series (and sometimes does), the storytelling on display here is so gripping and effective it doesn't really matter. Highly recommended. I'm probably going to move on to The Pacific next.
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Post by Jeremy on Dec 12, 2018 7:18:13 GMT -8
Homecoming is quite good. Solid characters, vivid atmosphere, some inventive camerawork. (Sam Esmail directed all the episodes, but didn't write any of them, which may explain why the show doesn't have the same storytelling problems as Mr. Robot.)
Julia Roberts is (unsurprisingly) great, while Bobby Cannavale and Stephan James give strong performances as well. And making the episodes around 30 minutes each (five hours total) keeps the show from getting bogged down with streaming bloat. All in all, definitely one of Amazon's better shows.
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Post by ThirdMan on Dec 14, 2018 22:45:12 GMT -8
Jeremy, I notice Alan Sepinwall is quite fond of Big Mouth, which he considers to be the second-best Netflix-produced animated series after Bojack. It's basically about teenage hormones and puberty, but the characters are well-rendered, well-voiced (by a pretty impressive cast), and it doesn't pull any punches. It's also very, very filthy, and more than a little gross at times. I've only watched two-and-a-half episodes, but I could see myself slowly progressing through its two seasons' worth of episodes, because it's very easy to watch. The question is, have you heard of it, or seen any of it?
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Post by Jeremy on Dec 15, 2018 17:43:35 GMT -8
I've seen a little, and... it's really not my speed. As you say, the show is really vulgar, and I don't find the characters (or the animation, for that matter) compelling enough to compensate for it. The show apparently features a pretty complex portrait of adolescence, but it's just too unappealing for me to care.
Incidentally, it looks like Netflix is quickly becoming the new home for raunchy animated comedy. Big Mouth, Paradise PD, Super Drags - all of them are seemingly marketed around the premise of being as R-rated as possible. I... guess there's a market for that?
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Post by Incandescence 112 on Dec 15, 2018 19:01:18 GMT -8
I've seen a little, and... it's really not my speed. As you say, the show is really vulgar, and I don't find the characters (or the animation, for that matter) compelling enough to compensate for it. The show apparently features a pretty complex portrait of adolescence, but it's just too unappealing for me to care. Incidentally, it looks like Netflix is quickly becoming the new home for raunchy animated comedy. Big Mouth, Paradise PD, Super Drags - all of them are seemingly marketed around the premise of being as R-rated as possible. I... guess there's a market for that? I agree with this. I don't mind vulgarity if there's a purpose. I don't see a purpose here-it's just for shock value. But the hormone monster was funny.
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Post by Jeremy on Dec 21, 2018 7:44:07 GMT -8
For some unholy, schedule-related reason, CBS chose to air the entire 13-episode season of Murphy Brown before the winter break. It was a lot of pain in a condensed timeframe, but thankfully it is now over.
Despite occasional flashes of humor and wit, the show never improved beyond the low bar set by the premiere. And why should it? The writers never really cared about making a great show; all they cared about was being "topical." And the political commentary remains perenially toothless, in part because, due to the TV development cycle, the show can't joke about current events until weeks after they occur. (This was a problem for the original series as well, but it was less noticeable before the age of social media.)
The show engages in a lot of journalistic back-patting, with a glazy-eyed fervor that puts The Newsroom to shame. Granted, the media gets attacked pretty viciously these days, but Murphy Brown is less interested in exploring the problems of bias and causes of "fake news" than in simply championing its lead characters as the true heroes of America. Which, if that's true, we're in even more trouble than I thought.
I'm not sure if this show gets a second (twelfth?) season - ratings are pretty steady, but they're below typical CBS standards. If the show does return, I probably won't; one season of ironic hate-watching is enough.
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Post by Zarnium on Dec 30, 2018 17:19:32 GMT -8
One of the better Electric Dreams episodes I've seen so far involves a dystopian future where an automated retail chain threatens to destroy the remaining humans by draining their resources to create consumer goods that no one needs or wants.
I could not quite get over the irony that I was watching it on Amazon Prime.
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Post by Zarnium on Jan 1, 2019 22:21:25 GMT -8
Ok, so I watched the episode "Safe and Sound" from Electric Dreams, and then read Film Crit Hulk's review of it, and I think there's something very interesting to take away from our extremely differing opinions about it.
One of the reasons I like Philip K. Dick's work so much is because of how well they portray the feeling of having everything you thought you knew about the world be turned upside-down, and then have to pick up the pieces afterwards and figure out what's really going on. You all probably know my story by now, I was raised in a young-Earth Creationist, Christian nationalist culture that taught me all sorts of fraud science and revisionist history and stuff, and I went through a tough period in my life where I had to rebuild my entire worldview from the ground up by myself, and then had to adjust to "normal" culture once I moved away from home and decided to abandon my former one. Dick's work portrays that feeling extremely well, in a way that no other writer I've ever read has.
"Safe and Sound", while only holding a tangential similarity plotwise to its source material (which I've not read), also portrays this feeling extremely well. It's about a future America divided into "bubble" zones, where invasive technology is banned, and "safe" zones, where extensive government monitoring is performed with the supposed intention of keeping the "safe" residents safe from terrorism. The "safe" residents maintain that they are under constant threat from terrorists from the "bubble", while the "bubble" residents maintain that the terrorist plots are a hoax designed to subjugate the populace. We never find out whether the terrorist attacks are, in fact, a hoax or not, leaving it ambiguous as to which side is spreading false propaganda. (Or at least, more false propaganda than the other.)
The story follows Foster, a teenage girl who moves with her mother from a "bubble" city to a "safe" one, and must adjust to the foreign culture while deciding whether to believe in the propaganda from her homeland or the propaganda from her new home. She's quickly overwhelmed; she initially doesn't know how to operate her futuristic smartphone-like device (a "dex"), something that everyone else in the city takes as second-nature, and has trouble relating to other students from her high school because she has difficulty reading their intentions, understanding their cultural touchstones, or telling whether they're being mean to her or not. Her mother wants her to stop using the Dex because of her deeply-held anti-tracking ideology, while her peers and her school want her to use one because it's a major inconvenience for both her and everyone else to not be using one. Not having access to any of the knowledge she would need to make an informed decision, her lifestyle is placed in the hands of people who would rather use her inexperience and lack of agency to bully her into accepting their own worldview instead providing a neutral environment for her to make up her own mind. Eventually, she ends up installing an implant that she can't turn off, which links her to the voice of man who ostensibly works for Dex tech support who forces her to perform increasingly bizarre and distressing actions. Since her father suffered from schizophrenia, she doesn't know if the voice in her head is a real person trying to help her, a real person trying to abuse her, or a delusion.
Frankly, while the episode is not perfect, I found it to be much more representative of my own life difficulties than the vast majority of fiction, and it follows in Dick's thematic footsteps very well, bringing everything I like about his books to mainstream television. It's about rational paranoia, it's about the fear of being wrong, it's about the inherent difficulties of determining reality from falsehood, it's about the hardships of adjusting to an unfamiliar environment, it's about not knowing who to trust and not being able to avoid those who you don't, and it's about being yanked around by greater powers who care more about their own agenda than your personal well-being. All things that I rarely see represented so well.
However, Film Crit Hulk sees things differently, believing it to be some sort of offensive race-erasure that appropriates the suffering of brown people for white peoples' spurious enjoyment. He doesn't see any of the deeper meaning of the text or what it has to offer, he just sees that characters talk about "terrorism" on the surface level, so the episode must be about terrorism, and the lead character is white and one of the antagonistic characters is black, so the episode is racist. It features a white person as the victim, and white people apparently don't suffer, so it's an offensive "hero fantasy" that indulges selfish white sensibilities and tells white people that they can be victims too, which is wrong.
It's just... come on, I like a lot of what I've read from Film Crit Hulk in the past, but this is just garbage. The review takes an episode that isn't about race in the slightest and which only features terrorism on the surface level, and interprets it as some kind of modern terrorism/brown suffering anology, which it isn't and isn't trying to be. In the process, the review erases everything that I find relatable and important about it, calling it "the most sneakily offensive episodes of television I've ever seen", so that the white male author can make himself out as a PC-hero. The themes and lessons that this episode features are actually important to some people, and they don't get represented in the media very often, especially in big-budget TV shows from a major streaming service instead of dusty old paperbacks from the sixties. And yes, some of the people who have been the victim of the kinds of things that the episode portrays are white. That doesn't mean it doesn't matter.
It bothers me that a normally insightful media critic is so dead-set on viewing a story through a single pre-determined political lens that he's completely ignored a different set of social issues that he doesn't seem to even be aware of, and which this episode might have opened his eyes to if he gave it a chance to do so. He's apparently just going to steamroll over anything he watches with his own preconceptions, and not pay attention to what it's trying to tell him. There's been some discussion around here recently about how critics have been keen to judge works more on their "social relevance" than their actual quality these last few years, and I think this is a pretty good example of that. If it's not an easily-digestible story about a popular and well-known issue, it's not good; and furthermore, it's an offensive distraction from the real issues.
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Post by Jeremy on Jan 2, 2019 6:33:42 GMT -8
I know Electric Dreams/Black Mirror comparisons are pretty much par for the course, but I'm reminded here of VanDerWerff's review of "USS Callister." Of course, I only have the reviews and your comments to tell me that, as I've watched very little of both Black Mirror and Electric Dreams. (That'll hopefully change this year.) I've made my thoughts on the issue clear in the past, and I won't reiterate them again. But I really do remember a time when TV critics were willing to explore themes of modern TV and film with more nuance. Society seems to be losing some of that nuance, and it's even reflecting in our pop-culture discussion. (How would people react if Season Two of The Wire aired today? Probably with lots of complaints about "whitewashing," I'd imagine.) Also, is it just me, or has Film Crit Hulk been doing this sort of "personal political projection" writing especially much lately?
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Post by Zarnium on Jan 2, 2019 6:39:03 GMT -8
I've read a few other pieces of his that I've liked, it helps that we're both huge fans of the McElroy Brothers. I've thought some of his other political writing was decent as well, but those were mostly standalone pieces that weren't pretending to be reviews of a specific work. I only have a cursory familiarity with him, though.
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Post by otherscott on Jan 2, 2019 8:52:37 GMT -8
Film Crit Hulk used to be one of my favourite critics, because he's very smart and knowledgeable about the craft of creating a movie. Look at this review of Nightcrawler for example, where his prime argument is not that a movie requires a CHARACTER arc exactly, but that the movie requires the viewers to have an arc in their relationship with the character. birthmoviesdeath.com/2015/01/09/film-crit-hulk-smash-nightcrawler-and-why-movies-dont-need-character-arcsLately he's been a little rough though, where his criticism tends to be a lot of projecting and finding insidious ideas. Which is fine if you're analyzing James Bond movies, which he has a whole series on that and mostly hits the mark. But I believe that TV and film most of the work of the creator is just bringing scenarios to the viewer. It's the job of the viewer to piece together what they MEAN exactly. And yes, if you bring sexist and/or racist ideas to watching a film or TV show it may help reinforce them, in the same way bringing sexist or racist ideas to life may result in you finding evidence to reinforce those beliefs. But it should not be the job of the artist to only bring stuff to the table that will 100% dissuade those beliefs. The job is to ask the questions, provide different angles on topics. That's what the best shows and movies are. They aren't puff pieces that reinforce how tolerant and feminist the viewer is, that is mostly why I've turned against Oscar bait. They are pieces that bring up slices of life that are unfamiliar to the viewer, and force the viewer to either alter their worldview to adapt to what they see, or adapt what they see to their worldview. I may be simplifying a lot here, but I don't need criticism to tell me what is good and what is bad based on the political viewpoint the show MIGHT espouse. Criticism is good for two reasons - to teach me how to watch, show me what to look for, help me understand the craft of what the show or movie is doing. And also to weed out the stuff that's not worth my time. That stuff about the worldview of the show and how it's racist or misogynistic or whatever - that's not the realm of the critic, that's something the audience has to decide for themselves.
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Post by Jeremy on Jan 2, 2019 10:57:16 GMT -8
I think discussing the political viewpoint of a film or TV show makes sense when that viewpoint actually feeds and influences the story. A film like Vice (to use a recent example) is heavily influenced by the political views of Adam McKay, and it's practically impossible to discuss the film without bringing up McKay's opinions on the Bush/Cheney administration. Even so, analysis is most effective if the critic tries to approach the film from a nonpartisan angle in talking about how the film presents those opinions (i.e. does the filmmaker make a thoughtful argument, or is he just pandering to a base of like-minded individuals? What about the film leads the critic to believe it's one of those things and not the other?).
Part of the reason I was motivated to start reviewing The West Wing a few years back was because virtually every review of the series I'd read seemed to incorporate the writer's own personal politics into the equation (which occasionally impacted their opinions in episodes like "In This White House" and "Game On"). I wanted to prove that it was possible to discuss the series' pros and cons from a nonpartisan standpoint, without making my personal politics part of the equation. The mark of a good TV show or film is making you think about ideas from a perspective you haven't considered, and not to simply regurgitate your own ideas right back at you. (This is partly what makes Atlanta the best show of 2018, and Murphy Brown the worst.)
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Post by Zarnium on Jan 2, 2019 12:22:13 GMT -8
If it's any consolation to any of us, most other opinions I've read have had a considerably more positive impression of the episode, praising it for its criticism of how invasive our modern technology is and how little we bother to resist it, which is another very important lesson.
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Post by ThirdMan on Jan 2, 2019 17:51:57 GMT -8
Speaking of Vice, it's interesting that the film has gotten mixed reviews from critics, given how so much of the media leans Liberal. Bale's gotten raves for his performance, but the word I'm hearing is the overall film's too unsubtle in its approach and scattershot in its targets to be among the best of the year.
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Post by Jeremy on Jan 2, 2019 19:01:49 GMT -8
Just based on the trailer, Bale is unrecognizable (in a good way). But it's nice that some critics are able to look past their personal biases and acknowledge the film's flaws.
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