Harvester on 11/1/2022 at 21:37
Malignant: James Wan returns to his horror roots, albeit with a higher budget. This is a movie directed with a steady hand by someone who knows what they're doing, and it has a pretty great third act plot twist that I kind of suspected but it turned out different than I thought. Also some really eerie monster effects, good audio with suitably creepy warped voices and some unnatural locomotion, which always creeps me out. I liked the shots of Underground Seattle, which I've learned is a real thing and would totally like to visit if I went there. It was also well written enough to succeed in making me care about the characters. No well-known actors but they do a good job. 8.5/10
Antlers: Here you see the difference a good horror director makes. This is not nearly as well directed, and if you pay attention to this kind of thing you can tell. It was also kind of boring in places, my attention slipped a few times. The acting is good though, I enjoyed seeing Keri Russell again and the child actors were also good. The fight/action scenes were kind of confusing sometimes with it being hard to tell what exactly happens, a stark contrast to the expertly directed action in Malignant. I did like the eco thriller elements and the indigenous people mythology, but I just wish it was handled better. 6.5/10
The Lost Daughter: This got great reviews from critics, but the audience score isn't that high, and I can see why. The main character is not at all likable, and while I can understand being a mother can be very hard and that that makes Olivia Colman's character recognize herself in Dakota Johnson's character, it's still hard to understand why she lets both the mother and the child go through so much anguish by stealing the doll and even harder to sympathize with. And at the end, that she thinks she can just return the doll and get away with it, or to be more precise, that she doesn't seem to care whether she gets away with it is quite frankly baffling. The acting is great though, by Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley who plays her as a younger person (but does not resemble her in the slightest, I had a hard time seeing them as the same character), and Dakota Johnson, who does a great job of portraying a calmly suffering mother barely keeping it together. And it was nice to see Ed Harris, who is surely getting old, also the kid from Normal People (truly weird dialogue during their dinner scene by the way), and Peter Sarsgaard who I didn't recognize because of the beard. Also, the camera is restless and often too close to the actors on many occasions, but I think that's not poor direction - by Maggie Gyllenhaal making a debut as both director and screenwriter - but a deliberate choice. It also should be noted that children are portrayed as being nothing more than a nuisance, which fits the theme of the movie but is kind of one-sided. It's an interesting movie, but kind of off-putting and hard to relate to, an uncomfortable watch. So I get why this is a critics darling that doesn't do great with general audiences (though not terrible either). 8/10
The Unforgivable: This is the other way around, critics were very unkind to this Netflix movie starring Sandra Bullock, but if you look at the IMDb score, it's actually a fair bit higher than The Lost Daughter. That means audiences responded pretty well to it, and it's easy to see why, because it's a relatable movie. Sure, I get the criticism, I guess seasoned moviegoers have seen this kind of movie many times before, and the twist can be predicted fairly easily, and the flashback scenes are poorly done and too repetitive, I agree with those gripes. But still, I was genuinely affected by the story, that also shows something about how hard it is to survive in lower class America and especially as an ex-con. Good acting by Sandra Bullock, and Jon Bernthal also gives a heartfelt performance. It might not be as artful as The Lost Daughter, but it's less cold and has more heart. 8/10
Matthew on 15/1/2022 at 23:46
I walked out of The Matrix: Resurrections with the biggest smile on my face. It was the sequel I didn't want and yet I enjoyed it more than any other movie I've seen in the past several months. Another lovely score to add to the collection as well.
Tocky on 16/1/2022 at 00:52
Harvester I would trust your views over all the critics. I put off watching The Unforgivable till I could see it with my wife because it seemed like the sort of thing we both would like and indeed it was. I know it has a lot of flashback scenes but it put them in at the appropriate times, times when a character would be thinking of that time. My only gripe there would be that it telegraphed the plot twist too early. Ten minutes in and she sets the gun down as she talks. Twenty minutes in he offers her and her sister a place to stay over the phone. That is when it clicks in your head. But not everybody is going to pick up on that so you have to have lag time and other flashbacks for those folks to catch up. But even knowing and maybe because of knowing you feel for her character. It's gritty and tough but it shows the acceptance of a hard life in a real way. Sometimes there is no choice so you take your no choice.
Harvester on 16/1/2022 at 16:16
Glad you liked it, Tocky! I didn't mind the flashback scenes either, it's just that there were relatively few image sequences and that the same images were repeated quite often. A little more variation in the images shown would've been nice. But I agree, it was impressive to see the way she tried to make the best of her hard fate. She had no choice but to become tough as nails.
I saw The Tender Bar on Amazon Prime Video. This movie, directed by George Clooney but not starring him, is the kind of nostalgic movie that's mostly aimed at men, would be my guess, though I'm sure some women will enjoy it too. As a movie based on real-life memoirs and being about a talented boy growing up poor trying to outgrow his upbringings, this is similar to Ron Howard's recent movie Hillbilly Elegy, but in my opinion The Tender Bar is the better movie of the two. Hillbilly Elegy veers close to poverty porn sometimes, but Tender Bar succeeds better in avoiding that trap. It shows a close-knit family where everyone looks out for each other, albeit often grumpily and reluctantly. Ben Affleck plays the father figure for the boy, his acting in movies is sometimes criticized but here in my opinion he does a great job as Uncle Charlie. As it's said in the movie every growing boy could benefit from having someone like Uncle Charlie in his life. We see the boy as a child and as a teenager on his way to and during his studies at Yale, though he always comes back to the house he grew up in and the bar Uncle Charlie tends to. The writing by William Monahan (who I regard highly as a screenwriter) is quite good and often poignant. This movie also nails the 70's and 80's aesthetic, from the interior decoration, clothes and hairdos and color schemes to cars and street scenes. It's quite beautiful to behold, and the movie benefits from this attention to detail. It also has a large number of great songs from these eras, the soundtrack is pretty awesome. I enjoyed this movie a lot, if you're subscribed to Prime Video you could have a fun evening with this movie and, fitting for such a bar-themed movie, a couple of cold ones. 8.5/10.
EDIT: I see now that the IMDb score is a 6.8, which is okay but not great. So your mileage may vary. But I'm a sucker for well-executed coming-of-age movies like Stand By Me, The Breakfast Club, Adventureland etc. The fact that Almost Famous (the Bootleg Cut version) is my favorite movie should tell you something about my tastes.
Marecki on 20/1/2022 at 14:16
Having dragged myself back to Netflix lately, here is a brief - and opinionated - summary of what I have seen there since summer 2021 or so:
* Dark (re-watched the first two seasons + then all the way to the end) - WHAT ARE YOU STILL DOING HERE GO WATCH IT RIGHT NOW. At least if you like SF and/or mind-benders, anyway.
* Big Mouth - fucking love it! Funny and irreverent on the one hand, refreshingly frank and non-judgemental on the topics of sexuality and puberty on the other. I'd show it to adolescent children for educational purposes if it weren't so delightfully filthy. Also, I SO want a bespectacled-dick plushy.
* Witcher, season 2 - still very good! Frankly speaking I think I like the series more than the novels themselves, not in the least because the former has somewhat toned down some of the stereotyping Sapkowski occasionally indulged in (and which I find vaguely amusing given the "it's people who are the real monsters, not the creatures or those who hunt them" leitmotif). Looking forward, I am quite curious what they are going to do with the fact Emhyr var Emreis is Duny having - for the rather obvious reason of TV being a visual medium - been revealed considerably earlier than in the novels.
* American Horror Story - quality varies from season to season but overall, good stuff - even though they have IMHO rather overdone the gore. Edgy, much?
* Disenchantment - Matt Groening has still got it! Fun to watch, many memorable characters... The fact that unlike in the very much episodic Simpsons and Futurama there a major story arch spanning the whole series is a nice bonus.
* Black Mirror - I first saw the first two seasons back in their Channel 4 days, then completely forgot about this series. Now I am VERY happy to have stumbled upon it again because the Netflix-produced seasons 3 (by far my personal favourite) and 4, as well as the interactive full-length film Bandersnatch, are absolutely mind-blowing - if rather chilling given some of the episodes feel to me like an increasingly accurate prophecy of where the social media will bring us in the not-so-distant future. Season 5 has been relatively disappointing but is still worth watching.
* Altered Carbon - meh. Nothing in particular I could complain about but a bunch of episodes into the first series, I realised I had zero interest in what would happen later.
* Nightflyers - to date, the only original Netflix series I regret having watched. This may or may not be related to the fact it's based on a novella by George R.R. Martin, which I only realised towards the end when I actually bothered to look at the credits - on the one hand I have yet to find anything by Martin I actually like, on the other I haven't read the source material. Basically, it started out promising enough for me that when the quality dropped I continued to watch it in the hope of the drop being temporary... and then it ended. It doesn't help that there are some gaping plot holes in the later episodes, and that I personally found most if not all (I'm a bit on the fence regarding Thale) characters fundamentally unlikeable.
Tocky on 4/2/2022 at 03:37
The Wheel of Time on Prime. In many ways it followed the book but it cut many more. Some scenes it added. Others it changed for special effect purposes or to cut characters. Overall I would say that the first book of Jordan's, The Eye of the World, was well represented. Better than the over 700 pages were presented in the first incarnation. They took that book and made the whole first season out of it. I missed the original camaraderie of the characters at the beginning at first but grew to understand the way the series presented them was better. Jordan had a penchant for over emotion over every damn little thing and that was wisely dropped for TV. Also several scenes were cut that I was glad to see go. Nobody likes the deus ex machina of suddenly a lightening bolt saves them. Also the strength of the lead was not downplayed for some surprise ending which was never a surprise in the first place.
I was a bit annoyed at all the inclusivity. Just that all bases races and creeds of sexuality had to be displayed. But I got used to it and by the end it didn't seem so forced. Some characters like Perrin fit like a glove right away and others less so. Rand as a curly red head wasn't a thing I had imagined while reading the book. And the Ogier wasn't as impressive as imagined either but overall a nice job and very watchable considering I find magic a bit too convenient a way out of things. One thing I was glad of was how Perrin saved the two of them. Rather than having Moraine send lightening in some long drawn out episode he used the power he had and accepted (much moreso than the book) to have the wolves tear The White Cloaks to shreds which was a most satisfying way to do considering what assholes they were. Most characters accepted their powers better and more naturally than the book where they agonized over them like unrealistic idiots.
I'm afraid Harvester, that you won't like the treatment of religion in this one. The White Cloaks are more how I think of religious types than how you do. They are the type for disdain in their hypocrisy I'm afraid. The worst of Puritan and Southern Baptist if allowed free reign. I know the better side too but these days these characters fit more along the classical religious types.
It's nice to see books referenced by so many here when speaking of series. A very literate bunch. Speaking of, the Jack Reacher series by Lee Child has been given air by Prime as well. I've only seen one episode so far and if they keep burning through The Killing Floor (first book of the series) like this then it won't last long enough for a season a book as Jordans work seems to be headed toward. However this one is spot on all the scenes with no deviations and it works well, better than I had thought it would even. I had heard Child patterned his character Reacher after the John D. McDonald character Travis McGee which is what drew me to that series but Reacher is only loosely based. Travis was more of an intellectual and less a superman though they both are tough guys. The prison fight scenes were worth the price of admission in the first episode though. Brutal. Totally unflinchingly brutal. Broken bones brutal. He gouges out an eye with his thumb which is a completely valid move when faced with several attackers. Still, it's realistic, and it's necessary. It's just that all that confidence seems contrived however it is shown. I'll have to see how the later scenes are handled to know if they can tone down the character to human levels. As I recall from the book he never quite makes it to ordinary guy though.
BTW Marecki, I did Bandersnatch the same as I do video games. I played all incarnations to see how each would turn out. Pretty much boxed in as they are generally but that one surprise window scene stunned me. I did that one that way right off and couldn't believe the result. I think you know the one.
Harvester on 4/2/2022 at 14:40
Quote Posted by Tocky
I'm afraid Harvester, that you won't like the treatment of religion in this one. The White Cloaks are more how I think of religious types than how you do. They are the type for disdain in their hypocrisy I'm afraid. The worst of Puritan and Southern Baptist if allowed free reign. I know the better side too but these days these characters fit more along the classical religious types.
I don't really mind fantasy or sci-fi writers creating evil religions in the books they write (and the shows that are made of those books). They should feel free to write what they want. If real-world religions are portrayed in a one-sided way in literature (that could go either way, either one-sidedly saintly or evil), I don't really like it, but I wouldn't want to censor them or pressure the authors to write in a different way about religion. Writers should have creative freedom. As far as fantasy is concerned, I understand atheists not wanting to read Christian metaphors (call it propaganda if you want) like the Narnia series by C.S. Lewis (I haven't read it myself by the way, but I've read other stuff by Lewis), and I myself have little interest in reading atheist counterparts like Pullman's The Subtle Knife. Writers can write what they want and readers can choose to read (and watch) what they want and that's the way I prefer it.
faetal on 4/2/2022 at 15:38
Just got done with the first half of season 4 of Ozark.
Damn that last scene with Julia Garner. Just damn.
Renault on 5/2/2022 at 06:40
Also just finished Ozark, it was great as always. It's so fun trying to decide who is truly evil and who isn't.
Anyone else watching Yellowjackets? It's part Alive, part Lost, and part Lord of the Flies. Definitely has my interest through the first 4 episodes. There's absolutely a feeling of "been there done that" from the shows I just mentioned (which obviously provided inspiration), but I still am very curious about where things are going. The show is good so far about laying down mysteries that demand answers.
demagogue on 5/2/2022 at 09:24
I just finished the first season of Yellowjackets. I thought I posted about it a bit earlier, but I can't remember. Anyway I liked it a lot. Aside from a few small foibles, even then in execution not the idea itself, overall I was into it.
Like you say, they've taken some formulas from some past shows and made them work for it. What I think I like most about it is each girl has a different flavor of batshit happening, each one by itself maybe only going so far. But mix them together and makes for some interesting and open-ended plot alchemy, which is good for a drama. The two plots from different time periods being fed out in parallel, but still playing off each other, is also a really cool hook for storytelling.