Current Watching

[Hot Pepsi]

I finished Station Eleven.
The experience lends credence to the hypothesis that I have ADD because I don’t really understand what happened with the Prophet and his rape cult. Otherwise, it was a nice ending.

[Sits]

Watched The Lost Daughter last night. Beautifully filmed, Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley both excellent, but felt a bit hollow. Maybe that was the point.

[Sunderporinostesta]

Hidden Assets. bbc4. 6 parter and first ones just finished so we’re starting the second. Irish-Belgian crime thriller. I like it.

[hobbes]

I finished Station Eleven.
The experience lends credence to the hypothesis that I have ADD because I don’t really understand what happened with the Prophet and his rape cult. Otherwise, it was a nice ending.

What rape cult?

[Hot Pepsi]

I got the idea that he was gathering up young girls for that purpose. I think I read that on Wikipedia.

[Hot Pepsi]

I’m finishing Vikings. I find the violence hard to deal with, but it’s not like that’s historically inaccurate.

**spoiler**

It seems to be stepping on their planned spinoff about Erik the Red and Leif Erickson by showing the Vikings making it to what is now Canada, but that’s ok. It gets the gist of the history, such as we know it.

I went down a wiki rabbit hole on the native people of what is now Newfoundland and Labrador. Sadly, there’s still a lot of nastiness about the lobster rights.

More reason not to eat lobster, I guess.

[Amor de Cosmos]

It seems to be stepping on their planned spinoff about Erik the Red and Leif Erickson by showing the Vikings making it to what is now Canada, but that’s ok. It gets the gist of the history, such as we know it.

That's what a referred to upthread. Re: Floki beating Leif Erickson to the punch. In reality I'm guessing they just hadn't confirmed the upcoming series,

[hobbes]

I got the idea that he was gathering up young girls for that purpose. I think I read that on Wikipedia.

Not in the TV show and as far as I recall not in the book

[Hot Pepsi]

It’s possible, I guess, that Erik and Leif weren’t the first Vikings to reach what is now Canada.

I also read that there’s some reasons to think they explored as far south as what is now New England or New York. They never made much effort to build major colonies, as far as anyone can tell, so any evidence they might have left could be gone.

There have been runes that are probably hoaxes found in Minnesota. Most likely the people of Scandinavian decent there just wanted more reason to feel more at home there in the 19th century. That’s interesting in it’s own right.

[Hot Pepsi]

The new MacBeth with Denzel Washington is good. No shock.

It has Alex Hassel. I saw him as Henry V in London in 2015 (or was it 2016?)

[hobbes]

Holy shit, not only is the Eternals a big bag of arseholes, but now I hear the thing at the end is teasing a remake of Blade.
Blade is cinematic perfection. Remaking it is nuts. It's like remaking The Godfather or Casablanca or that one about the flowery sledge.

[Hot Pepsi]

They announced the MCU Blade film a while ago. They formally brought out Ali at a Comic-Con. This just showed that Black Knight will be involved somehow.

It’s not a “remake.” It’s putting the character in the MCU, so the story will be different.

I wasn’t that impressed with the Blade films, really. Wesley Snipes isn’t a good
actor.

Comparing it to Godfather or Casablanca is ridiculous.

[Slightly Brown]

Season two of Operation Bigfoot. It’s basically Ancient Aliens* meets Ghost Hunters meets The Blair Witch Project. This one has a sheen of authenticity. The terrain in which they are wandering is vast and dense and miles away from everything. The protagonists seem valid. Alas, the evidence is always just out of reach: the washed-away footprint, the lost clump of hair. It’s still good theatre. Also, if I was Bigfoot I’d have nothing to do with humans either.

*those dudes would have loved The Eternals

[danielmak]

Euphoria - HBO - uh....philthy, distressing and wildly addictive. 8 episodes in the first season.

I thought all the ads were for a new series, so I started watching not realizing that season 2 was about to start.

The good: this show captures the combination of everything seeming so extreme for teenagers and everything being so mundane for teenagers. The cinematography and music supervision are fantastic. The structure of each episode with the narration and character history is really good.

The bad: None of the actors are teens but all play teens, so the sex and nudity is creepy. This show is really just a Kids re-do, but Kids, for all its controversy, never showed nudity or sex. There is some irony in that given Larry Clark's previous photo work, most notably Tulsa. I assume the directors would say that they want to show the confusion, pain, wanting to be an adult version of adolescence but I think they could get at the ideas without the actual nude shots of adults playing teens.

[hobbes]

Comparing it to Godfather or Casablanca is ridiculous.

It was supposed to be.

[hobbes]

Although honestly I'd rather watch Blade on a Saturday afternoon than either of the others and I love Casablanca.

[Hot Pepsi]

The Godfather is being released into theaters again.

[RobW]

The new MacBeth with Denzel Washington is good. No shock.

It has Alex Hassel. I saw him as Henry V in London in 2015 (or was it 2016?)

That is the only positive review i've seen. I'm watching it tomorrow and trying not to read too much about it beforehand.

[Hot Pepsi]

That’s not representative, then. It got an 87% on MetaCritic and 93 on RottenTomatoes.

[Sunderporinostesta]

Hidden Assets. bbc4. 6 parter and first ones just finished so we’re starting the second. Irish-Belgian crime thriller. I like it.

Finished it. We enjoyed it though there’s more than a few moments where you can’t help but say out loud “the police wouldn’t have done that surely”. Which is really just down to lazy production standards not plot holes. It’s no The Wire or Homicide or Spiral but it’s decent enough.

Back to the four and a half series of Justified I need to cram in over the next 15 days or so.

[WOM]

Love Justified. They've just announced a new season, too.

[G-Man]

Yeah, Justified Goes To Detroit. I'm not sure how it'll work. Rural Kentucky was so central to the show. I hope they don't bring back anybody else from the series, other than Winona. And maybe allow Wynn Duffy to return from Fiji.

[G-Man]

I lately watched the four-part Netflix documentary "Stories Of A Generation". It's very, very good. Basically, people of 70 years up tell their story, hooked on a theme. All that is framed around interviews with Pope Francis. It's not particularly religious -- in as far as it is, the message is universally applicable -- and never bible-thumping. The people featured are mostly relatively unknown, other than Martin Scorsese and Jane Goodall. But what stories: the mother of a young pregnant woman who was disappeared in Argentina; the activist mother whose activist daughter was assassinated; the South African photographer who delivers a photo of an anti-apartheid activist to his niece... Not all stories are so depressing. There's the Vietnamese shoemaker who will make shies till the day he dies, or the Uruguayan couple that learnt to tango in old age.

It's compelling, and inspiring. And if it achieves its aim of having younger people listen to the stories of the older generations, then that's fantastic.

[ad hoc]

Think I want to rescind my early recommendation of Gloria. The bits of the dialogue which is are English are terribly clunky and clichéd. Plus the American characters are all really poor actors. I'm not sure if the Portuguese acting and script is better (I'd definitely hope so) but meh. Music is still good, mind

[WOM]

Anyone else watch this Pacino thing Hunters? Basically, Nazi revenge porn with a '70s New York veneer combined with a Tarantino / Blaxploitation-flick thing from time to time. I'm into it, but still not sure what to make of it.