Current Watching

[Hot Pepsi]

I watched One Night In Miami. It takes a while to get going but it’s fantastic. Great performances and it raises all sorts of important questions.

[Mr Delicieux]

What an extraordinary programme! I'm halfway through the first episode and not sure what to make of it, but thank you for alerting me to it.

The guy knows how to weave a story, and weave is the word that comes to mind whenever I watch one of his documentaries.
I've laid the boot into the BBC a fair bit these past few years, but this helped remind me how vast an organisation that it is.

[Uncle Ethan]

Watched the last episode of The Bay. Bloodlands seems promising.

[Nocturnal Submission]

The guy knows how to weave a story, and weave is the word that comes to mind whenever I watch one of his documentaries.
I've laid the boot into the BBC a fair bit these past few years, but this helped remind me how vast an organisation that it is.

You should start a thread for it. I'll contribute. The first episode alone was amazing stuff, just for the stories, let alone the interconnections.

[Hot Pepsi]

I’m finally getting around to The Trial of the Chicago 7. It’s very Sorkin, for better and worse.

Great performances. And it dovetails with the the new Fred Hampton film, which is even better.

What a travesty of justice that trial was.

[Incandenza]

Finished Schitt's Creek. The last season got a bit sentimental, but the moment that made me bawl was from an earlier season when someone who isn't in the main cast had a big moment, and it was terrific.

Great show.

[Hot Pepsi]

Mr Mayor was supposed to be a sequel to 30 Rock, but Alec Baldwin didn’t want to do it. So they shifted it to LA and got Ted Danson. Otherwise, it’s like a combo between 30 Rock and Parks & Rec.

[Lang Spoon]

Watching season 2 of Castle Rock. Tonally very strange, don't know what to think at all.

[San Bernardhinault]

I've seen the first four episodes of Mr Mayor and have very much been enjoying it. I didn't get any sort of a 30 Rock vibe out of it, despite the Tina Fey connection. Not that I didn't love 30 Rock, it's just that I hadn't felt the connection between the shows yet.

[Sits]

Already getting sad that we only have two episodes of Queen’s Gambit remaining.

[Hot Pepsi]

I've seen the first four episodes of Mr Mayor and have very much been enjoying it. I didn't get any sort of a 30 Rock vibe out of it, despite the Tina Fey connection. Not that I didn't love 30 Rock, it's just that I hadn't felt the connection between the shows yet.

Just the omnishambles office environment, the way old white men just expect everything to go their way and are often oblivious to the people, especially women, who are controlling the chaos.

[Mr Delicieux]

You should start a thread for it. I'll contribute. The first episode alone was amazing stuff, just for the stories, let alone the interconnections.

I think I will, just need to write something suitably descriptive to go with it.

[pebblethefish]

Apocalypse Now has just started on BBC2. There's no way that I can stay awake long enough...

It's on the Iplayer for the next month. I was going to watch it yesterday, but realised that it was 3 hours long and I was half-cut. It's a film that it really annoys me that I haven't seen, so I've got 28 days to find an evening I can fit it in.

[San Bernardhinault]

Watched Greenland yesterday. Disaster movies with Gerard Butler are usually a last resort for us, but Mark Kermode choosing it as his movie of the week persuaded us to give it a shot.
He wasn't wrong. This is no Geostorm, this is probably the best Gerard Butler led film I've seen, and obviously Morena Baccarin can do no wrong.
As disaster movies go this was far more character led than the usual CGIfest you normally get. You care more about what happens to them rather than what gets blown up next. Of course it has the usual disaster movie tropes where the clock is ticking and they somehow make it to the destinations with seconds to spare.

SPOILER
Particularly well done scenes are when the characters have to fight for their lives. These aren't the usual movie fights where everyone can take endless punches and have suddenly mastered kung fu. Butler has to really scrap in the truck scene and when he defends himself with a claw hammer he is absolutely shaken and horrified at taking a life.
My one gripe would be the finale was one scene too many at the end. I'd have preferred it finished with them in the shelter and we were left to make our own minds up about the end of the world, but it seems most movie audiences don't want that.

I love trashy disaster movies. Greenland might not have quite been trashy enough to hit home perfectly, but it was a pretty entertaining and well made piece. With - by the standards of trashy disaster movies - a fairly restrained use of CGI and FX and nothing was terribly unconvincing (apart from the speed at which high-quality footage from satellite was getting broadcast on TV...)

Butler's accent seemed to start off in New England but rapidly move back to somewhere a few hundred miles offshore west of Scotland, to the extent that I now wonder if I just wasn't listening right at at the start of the film.

I don't know if it'll hit the kind of cult status that San Andreas and 2012 have achieved in our house, but it'll probably go into the cheesy-disaster-movie rotation of films you can put on in the background and drop in and out of.

[WOM]

Already getting sad that we only have two episodes of Queen’s Gambit remaining.

Okay, so now that you're far enough along....did you mind the change from the younger actor in the orphanage to the older actor that carries the rest of the series? We did. Her change in personality was too drastic. The younger girl was quirky/brilliant in an '11 from Stranger Things' way, and the older girl is cheeky/rebellious in a way that I found unconvincing.

[WOM]

Oh, and any scene in the show that involved a bridge in any way was filmed just a few kilometers north of our house in the Rouge valley.

[Ray de Galles]

I love trashy disaster movies. Greenland might not have quite been trashy enough to hit home perfectly, but it was a pretty entertaining and well made piece. With - by the standards of trashy disaster movies - a fairly restrained use of CGI and FX and nothing was terribly unconvincing (apart from the speed at which high-quality footage from satellite was getting broadcast on TV...)

Butler's accent seemed to start off in New England but rapidly move back to somewhere a few hundred miles offshore west of Scotland, to the extent that I now wonder if I just wasn't listening right at at the start of the film.

I don't know if it'll hit the kind of cult status that San Andreas and 2012 have achieved in our house, but it'll probably go into the cheesy-disaster-movie rotation of films you can put on in the background and drop in and out of.

I was wondering what accent Butler was going for but (given they deliberately referenced him not being American in the scene in the back of the truck) I presumed it was pretty much his natural one, i.e. a well-educated Glaswegian who has spent a lot of his recent life in LA.

[Sits]

Okay, so now that you're far enough along....did you mind the change from the younger actor in the orphanage to the older actor that carries the rest of the series? We did. Her change in personality was too drastic. The younger girl was quirky/brilliant in an '11 from Stranger Things' way, and the older girl is cheeky/rebellious in a way that I found unconvincing.

I was OK with it because I assumed we’d jumped a few years and the life had changed her, plus she’d got a bit of her bestie’s confidence.

As for the bridges, I did happen to admire a nice old bridge in either Ep. 5 or 6. Only one left now.

[gt3]

Is there a thread for It's A Sin?

[diggedy derek]

Just finished it myself tonight gt. Preach on my man.

[Hot Pepsi]

I gave up on that quickly. I liked the music, but it wasn't for me. I've heard its brilliant.
I'm not interested in "young people having sex" as a genre and the AIDS crisis in the 80s is more tragedy than I want to deal with right now.

However, I am watching The Assistant. Fucking harrowing. It's about a young woman, played by Julia Garner, who works for, essentially, Harvey Weinstein, and gets treated like shit by all the men in the office and just sort of ignored by the women.

I hope she murders her boss. But I don't think it's that kind of film.

[gt3]

Watched It's A Sin over the last two evenings. Uniformly excellent performances. Russel T Davies' storytelling was superlative. Production values and evocation of the times was pitch perfect. Obviously there was some composite characters. I loved the way that RTD told the story of how the insidiousness of HIV/AIDS insinuated itself into lives. The young chap who played Ritchie, Olly Alexander is clearly delightful. I had seen him on Graham Norton before the series aired and it seems did little by way of acting in the series - in a good way. Keeley Hawes on the warpath in e5 was a force of nature. And I thought Jill was wrong to blame her for what happens to Ritchie. I used to know a lot of people like Jill who hung out with gay men (very often they didn't hang out with gay ladies). And Jill almost being an enabler was an interesting twist in her character.

Soundtrack it goes without saying (though I am saying it) was so good. Brought back along of memories.

[Nefertiti2]

Crash Landing on You, anyone?

[diggedy derek]

It's A Sin was really great. I'd be interested in other peoples' takes.

I thought the characters seemed a bit underdeveloped as it headed into the first sections of tragedy (there was a lot of use of montage early on) but perhaps that's just the point, that young people were cut down in their prime of more accurately way before. Similarly, the character of Jill niggled me at some points, the way she didn't seem to have her own inner life independent of the boys, but maybe that's the point of the narrative. It would have been nice to have more female character though I think. I suppose Jill could be seen as an enabler but to be honest I so much of her life was taken up with a desperate need to be compassionate there was not much space or possibility for judgment. It was an unfolding tragedy.

The last episode in parts I thought risked being a bit stage-y with two conflicting characters on each side, and at times I thought the mother character was dogmatic in a way that left little space for doubt or complexity. But I don't have any personal insight into that time or the tragedy as a whole.

I heard from someone who worked one one business aspect of the series that It's A Sin was not the original title. It was going to be called The Boys, I think. It's A Sin when you think about it is an odd title, as none of the men in the drama seem conflicted about who they are.

[Satchmo Distel]

I watched the Billie Holiday documentary that uses Linda Kuehl's interview tapes from 1971-78. I learned a lot and the restoration of the films is stunning (I've never seen her features so clearly), as is the photo research (tons I'd not seen before) but I wanted far more on her musical genius. There must be a lot on the tapes about her technique that was ignored in favour of sex and drugs stuff.