Thirith on 5/2/2022 at 14:09
We just finished the Sky/HBO four-parter Landscapers, a strange, funny, poignant, unsettling miniseries taking a real-life crime as its starting point but ending up doing something very different and unexpected. It's very self-reflexive and meta, so if you're not into that, avoid Landscapers, but I loved it. There's more than a touch of both the Coens and of Charlie Kaufman, and Olivia Colman and David Thewlis are fantastic.
faetal on 5/2/2022 at 16:50
Quote Posted by Brethren
Also just finished Ozark, it was great as always. It's so fun trying to decide who is truly evil and who isn't.
It can sometimes be a bit of a tiring watch because everyone is pretty awful.
rachel on 6/2/2022 at 12:51
I put the first episode of Reacher yesterday not expecting much and I ended up bingeing the whole season in one seating. Prefacing this by saying that I'm among the rare few who, despite reading the series, were not put out by Tom Cruise's performance in the movie adaptations (or even the choice of having him in the first place), the 2022 show is pretty solid and I will agree that it is more faithful to how the book depicted the character. Alan Ritchson's Reacher is not just greatly layered, he's also great at showing these layers gradually, playing on the other characters' expectations (and in some way also those of the ones among the audience who don't know the books). Reacher is an enigma when you first meet him, but the core elements of his character are never in doubt, and the first episodes establishes that perfectly by having him say absolutely nothing in the first ten minutes or so, yet show both where his moral compass points to and how skilled he is at what he does. And while he is a nigh-unstoppable powerhouse with Holmesian-level deductive skills, he's also sufficiently reliant on others during the course of the series that he doesn't quite become the Gary Sue one could mistake him to be at first glance.
The supporting cast also does a bang up job, Willa Fitzgerald as the tough-as-nails Roscoe and Malcolm Goodwin as the uptight by-the-book Finlay, alongside veteran actors like Currie Graham and Bruce McGill for the antagonists. The setting brilliantly reeks of "small town with a dark secret" from the very beginning (a staple of the book series) and the whole fun is to entangle what that secret is, and the twists make it very worthwhile at the same time as they make it very, very personal for Reacher, something the baddies painfully discover is definitely something you never want to face.
All in all, this adaptation is a very pleasant surprise, moreso than Jack Ryan, also on Prime and for which I had similarly subverted expectations. The 8-episode format allows writers and actors the time and space to really explore and develop the characters in a way that feels natural and organic, establish the backstories, introduce foes, allies and folks in between without rushing through the motions, play with the uncertainty of knowing who's with or against our protagonist...
With a whole book series to choose from, if they can keep up that level of care for the source material, I'll be looking forward to future seasons.
[video=youtube;GSycMV-_Csw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSycMV-_Csw&ab_channel=PrimeVideo[/video]
Gray on 7/2/2022 at 06:56
I've been watching Boba Fett on Disney+. Initially, I was a bit disappointed, I found it less impressive than the Mandalorian, but perhaps my hopes were unrealistically high. Then it picked up, and surprised me several times. Last episode is next week, and now I expect Big Things.
I watched all the various Star Wars animated shows, not because I enjoyed them, only about one episode in five were any good, but I just wanted to get all the backstory. But I did my homework. I'm very happy to say that I much more enjoy the live action shows, like Mandalorian and Boba Fett, and looking forwards to the others announced. On a scale of Star Wars nerdism, I'm probably only a 6 or 7 out of 10. I grew up with it, I watched all the movies at least three times, some 30 times, but I don't always know all the finer points of every minor character. But, I found it extremely awesome when a certain fan favourite turned up in the last episode of Boba Fett, I did not expect that. Very, very cool.
rachel on 7/2/2022 at 08:33
Interesting. I dropped out of BoBF after three episodes because it just didn't seem to really go anywhere, especially compared to The Mandalorian, which was pretty fresh in comparison. I was also not impressed by Fett's badass decay (I totally get that Morrison is 20 years older, but the character is not), I felt it really a disservice to the character given all the mystique around him.
I might give it another chance if it gets better in later episodes.
Thirith on 7/2/2022 at 08:53
I have to admit that I never was a big fan of Boba Fett - Badass Extraordinaire. He was mysterious and had a cool visual design in Empire Strikes Back, and he was a joke in Return of the Jedi. I never much liked bringing him back just because fans had latched on to him.
At the same time, while Book of Boba Fett seemed to be trying to tell a story of an ageing badass, which could be interesting and reasonably different from The Mandalorian, it did so really badly. Just because you're telling the story of someone who's growing old and slow and tired doesn't mean that the storytelling has to be this phlegmatic and lacking in direction. You could've had something closer to Logan, another story about a badass past his prime, but the first few episodes of BoBF were a slow, boring mess. And then the series went, "Actually, let's not tell this story about Boba Fett, let's tell a different one about different characters, with Fett more or less a background character", and while those episodes are more enjoyable, it raises the question all the more: why spend all that time on a character that's old and tired, if you don't have a good story to tell about him?
Gray on 10/2/2022 at 01:38
Quote Posted by Gray
I've been watching
Boba FettSweet holy fuck. There was so much fan service in the last two episodes of Boba Fett. I will give no spoliers, but if you're a old fat sad man who grew up with Star Wars 40 years ago, pretty much all your dreams are fulfilled there. Maybe not all, but close enough. I expect we poor stupid nerds will debate the death of a much loved and hated character for at least a couple of decades. I really should not get this excited, I'm a 50 year old actual grownup, talking about a kids' show, but I was watching it with another fan and we got ourselves all worked up.
I would say watch it. But only if you are a proper Star Wars nerd, or you will not enjoy it as much as we did. I have spoken.
Tocky on 12/2/2022 at 03:39
Quote Posted by raph
I put the first episode of
Reacher yesterday not expecting much and I ended up bingeing the whole season in one seating. Prefacing this by saying that I'm among the rare few who, despite reading the series, were not put out by Tom Cruise's performance in the movie adaptations (or even the choice of having him in the first place), the 2022 show is pretty solid and I will agree that it is more faithful to how the book depicted the character.
I don't think it was Cruise's performance folks were put out by but his size. Reacher is a fairly far fetched character from the outset and to do the things he does would physically take a large person of exceptional bone density. Did you hear the ring of that crow bar as it struck him repeatedly? Nobody could take that sort of punishment and continue to fight back. Do you know how bad a crow bar hurts? I do. I had a stubborn board let go all of a sudden. I heard that ring in my head. When I got to the mirror I thought "oh that's not so bad, just a scratch" then I put my fingers on either side of it and opened it to show my teeth and gums through that scratch. Anyway I got off point but Reacher has to be large. Ritchson fits the bill.
And, although I agree and even revel in all you said about Reacher and Ritchson is perfect in the role, I still feel he is too super human. McDonald made his character, Travis McGee, who was also large, more human somehow. He was able to be beaten on occasion. It made for a more tense situation when shit did hit the fan. Often McGee had to think his way out of shit instead of relying on brawn and imperviousness to hard swung crowbars. One thing I like about both is that they aren't above playing dirty. It's nice to see the bad guy be surprised he isn't the baddest.
Anyway it was a hell of a first season which captured the book perfectly and Ritchson fills out Reachers huge shoes as if he were made for them. I wonder if they will follow the books sequentially.
demagogue on 13/2/2022 at 08:51
I watched the Landscapers too. I guess I had forgotten why I put it on my list, but evidently it was because Thirith mentioned it here.
Anyway, it's a very humanizing story for a true crime genre. The two leads were pretty pitch perfect. And as Thirith says, it gets pretty meta in a Charlie Kaufman sort of way which I could appreciate. It was something that started small and got more ambitious over the course of the show, like it knew it could keep pushing the envelope, but just in little pushes at a time.
An interesting part of it for me was when I realized that they were constructing the story from the tidbits of public information they could get, little details from the case it tried to explain or snippets from interviews when they could get it, and when they couldn't get any deeper, they'd even put those limitations into the show. It works for a police procedural or true crime story where there are different versions of the truth, and a few others have done similar things.
rachel on 1/3/2022 at 12:20
Well, I finally caught up on Westworld after rewatching the first season, the only one I'd seen, and I eventually quit with about three episodes left on season 3. From the first episodes of S2 I had a sense this was going off the rails, I found just went all over the place, the whole Maeve plot was insufferable because I can't stand that character (no offense to Thandiwe Newton), and the Dolores plot I found to be incredibly basic. Going into S3, I was wondering if it would get better but I didn't find it to be the case. It's an interesting parallel that Rehoboam puts humans in loops just like humans did hosts, but it's all surface level. Dolores has lost all depth of character. Fake Hale and Aaron Paul's characters are a little more interesting but it's not explored fully. It's disappointing, and I don't think I'll watch S4. All in all, they really should have stuck with a single season.
Anyway.
So based on a friend's recommendation, I put on Mare of Easttown, also on HBO. Completely different genre but three episodes in, I'm completely hooked. The writing, the acting are tight and believable, it feels like a mix of Twin Peaks (without a supernatural angle) and Forbrydelsen, especially the latter with the similarities between Mare and Sarah Lund. The setting of Easttown is on point, I read they filmed on location in Pennsylvania and it shows. The supporting cast is also stellar: Jean Smart, Guy Pearce, Evan Peters, Agourie Rice flesh out the background stories, making the whole feel consistent. I have to reserve full judgment for after I finish but it's shaping up to be darn good if it keeps up that kind of quality. It's like a good book, I both want and don't want to finish it.