froghawk on 11/5/2020 at 22:43
The Lighthouse was quite the cinematic deliriant. Really something!
Sulphur - would you recommend Westworld s3 to someone who thought s1 was quite solid but s2 was absolute bollocks from top to bottom? I'm scared to go back in, but if it at least gets close to s1's quality it might be worth the dive.
Quote Posted by Harvester
After the MCU movies I think I'll do the same with Star Wars (still haven't seen Rise of Skywalker). Maybe I'll watch the Mandalorian too, it only has one season, not that much of a time sink. Definitely not Clone Wars, just as I'm not going to watch Agents of Shield, Jessica Jones or the other Marvel shows.
Too bad, seeing as some seasons of the Netflix shows were by far the best stuff that Marvel has to offer.
Sulphur on 12/5/2020 at 04:20
Not really. It's better because they dropped the timeline fuckery, but S3 is more its own thing, more plot-forward than philosophically driven; can't really say it's a return to form if you count S1 as the pinnacle.
S3 is much better paced than the first two seasons though, and the first half of it is fairly entertaining, because it borrows some energy from the later seasons of Person of Interest and uses that to craft some nice set pieces. In the process, though, it shortchanges a bunch of players like Maeve and William (and sends Bernard on a vision quest :erg:), and loses any dramatic depth it could have had in the last half.
I wished it had all come together in a less hackneyed way in the end (one of S1's strengths was that it was surprising in many ways), but perhaps that was hoping for a different story entirely. At any rate, there'll be a Season 4, and it's going to be weird if the way things ended is anything to go by.
Sulphur on 12/5/2020 at 06:01
RE: control, the story carries forward S2's philosophical battle between determinism and free will to humanity at large, pretty much like Devs. It's neat, but also borrows chunks of ideas from various sources, not least of which is Asimov's Foundation series. Nothing wrong with that, the real problem is that it's executed in ways that are muddy and shallow. Serac's 'twist' wasn't unexpected, and it really isn't about Dolores fighting herself, it's about not accepting your existence being dictated by a program - something she did all the way back in S1, hence the callbacks to it. Dolores taking over humanity's existence wouldn't be interesting, it'd just be tiresome and at complete odds with her character.
Again, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the plot, it's just not executed with the kind of character writing it needs to really sing. There's also the broader problem that until S3, Rehoboam hadn't even been hinted at, so it's a massive ask to accept Westworld's Earth as so different to ours when there wasn't any intimation of it in the 20 preceding episodes.
Also, part of S3's grand point was that because of Rehoboam, 'Westworld' effectively had become the entire planet with human beings as the hosts.
Thirith on 12/5/2020 at 11:18
With both me and my wife working from home, we've been having proper lunch breaks and watching an episode of one of the series we're currently watching, so we've got on with a fair few of them.
One that I'm starting to like a lot, even if it's often pretty unpleasant to watch unless you've got a high tolerance for cringe comedy, is HBO's Succession, which is pretty much what you'd get if the writers of The Thick of It were to do a modernised reimagining of King Lear. It features one of the most toxic families I can remember in all of TV, but it also succeeds at making most of its horrible characters layered and complex in surprising ways. The cast is amazing (I can't think of a single member of the main cast who isn't pitch perfect) and the episodes pack a surprising dramatic, even tragic punch. But yes: if (like my wife, unfortunately) you tend to find cringe comedy difficult to watch, this one might not be your thing. Also, its more tragic aspects might fall flat if you'd rather not waste any sympathy on a bunch of obscenely rich, entitled but possibly kinda sad assholes.
froghawk on 12/5/2020 at 11:58
Perhaps it's good that Nolan's Foundation never came to fruition, then? He just ended up awkwardly recycling bits of the script in his current project, much like his brother awkwardly recycled bits of his unproduced Howard Hughes script in Dark Knight Rises?
It's at least good that they went in a different direction. S2 struck me as one of those sequels that tries to repeat all the twists of the first iteration on a larger scale, but given the nature of those twists it ended up just feeling like a parody of the original thing. I figured s3 would end up doing the same and just reveal that every human character in the show was secretly a robot that had had their mind replaced with someone else's. Glad they at least tried something different - too bad they didn't execute it well. Guess I'll pass.
Sulphur on 12/5/2020 at 12:11
Hah, I didn't even know he'd planned on adapting it. From a writing standpoint, it's starting to make more sense why all these bits and pieces came together the way they did, then, especially S3's headlong dive into a modernised psychohistory framework complete with Foundation and Empire's Mule writ large. I think Jonathan shares Asimov's weaknesses in that his characters tend to be fairly stiff, but Asimov had both a scientific eye and a warmer philosophical outlook that informed his stories. Nolan, instead, is treading the line between gimmicky populist entertainment and thoughtful science fiction, and it's a very hard thing to balance if you're not equally gifted in writing both character drama and technological vision. I wouldn't call S3 a complete waste of time because the concepts it's chewing on will never not be interesting, but you'll have to prepare to be underwhelmed.
Thirith: I see Succession less as cringe comedy and more as black-hearted family satire. There's a lot of comparisons to the Murdoch empire, and as a window into the familial/political machinery of something like that, it never fails to stoke a morbid curiosity. And the cast is absolutely perfect, yes. S2's Holly Hunter was a more than welcome addition, and I hope they have her return in S3.
Thirith on 12/5/2020 at 14:39
Quote Posted by Sulphur
I see Succession less as cringe comedy and more as black-hearted family satire.
I think they're both a part of
Succession, and especially the scenes where we get to watch the pathetic dick-waving contests and corporate dysfunction at Waystar Royco feel a lot like the cringier parts of
The Thick of It. I don't mind that aspect as much as my wife does, but I definitely respond more to the darker, more layered strands of the series. (We just watched the S1 Thanksgiving episode today, which may be one of my favourite TV episodes since
Watchmen and
The Leftovers before that.)
Gryzemuis on 13/5/2020 at 00:41
I watched S02 of Westworld. I liked it. Just as good and entertaining as S01 imho. I watched 2 episodes of S03. Promising. Then I got distracted.
This week I watched 8 out of 10 episodes of S01 of Better Call Saul. Awesome ! I have 2 (female) friends who highly recommended the show. I wasn't sure I'd like it. I've seen all of Breaking Bad. But I never was a huge BB fan. It took me 2 seasons to start to appreciate BB a bit. Otoh, I really liked the first episodes of Better Call Saul immediately.
Gonna finish S01 of BCS, then finish Westworld S03, then watch the other seasons of BCS. Looking forward to that.
demagogue on 13/5/2020 at 01:56
I'm 4 episodes into Better Call Saul Season 5, when we can finally really start to feel it approaching Breaking Bad's era. It's been such a slow burn building up to this point that the characters are pretty rich with history and emotional baggage, Saul and Mike particularly. In typical form, you can feel something ominous coming is already in the pipes, but we don't know what, which is quite a feat when we already know the "end" (the start of Breaking Bad). It's also nice to see more coverage in the post-BB part this season.
Sulphur on 13/5/2020 at 06:22
I've always been more than a bit worried about Kim from the start, knowing as we do she doesn't figure in Breaking Bad. Nacho, as well, has exactly one mention in BB. Absolutely agree about the ominous clouds on the horizon for the final season.
The thing about BCS is that I've never bought the character drama portion of it. I've enjoyed individual parts of it, but never the whole. I don't think Jimmy's personality is particularly well-developed, it's always felt to me like with his character, they're trying to cover a jumbo-sized slice of toast with a tiny pat of butter. Kim almost seemed like she'd end up as the long-suffering, unhappy, fractious wife counterpart to Skylar, but I'm glad they gave her far more depth than that. The inverse BB formula doesn't quite work for this as an overarching arc - Jimmy's move from conman to conflicted wiseass lawyer was never going to be as compelling as Walt's unravelling from Mr. Chips to Scarface, so the drama is something I usually end up tolerating more than being invested in. It's very push-pull.
Also, is anyone else tired of the flash-forwards to Cinnabon Jimmy that have been happening for five seasons now? There had better be a hell of a payoff (prediction: involving Kim in some capacity) at the end of this.
The drama that does work though, is every single thing that harkens back to Breaking Bad. The cartel parts, everything with Mike and Gus and Nacho and the Salamancas, it's all gripping stuff that plays to the show's strengths. The payoff for when Jimmy and Mike are forced to cross paths again was a long time coming, but it's now paying dividends.