Current Watching

[Hot Pepsi]

I’ve still got Mindhunter on my to-do list, but others in the house aren’t so keen to dive in, so we keep putting it off.

Watched the latest A Star Is Born remake (paid for via Amazon Prime) last night - the Bradley Cooper one with Lady Gaga. She’s not a favourite singer of mine: a bit too much bellowing in The Club Style, and the speedy bar-singer-to-Grammy-winning solo star route shown seemed unlikely, but it’s a well done film of a familiar story. I know the original 30s one was loosely based on early Hollywood couples whose trajectory/addictions were similar, but I can’t think of an obvious music industry couple that fit the storyline of the latest remake...Cobain and Love at a push, maybe.

The real-world analogs for Jackson and Allie are hard to pin down.

My best guess is Jackson Maine is like Eddie Vedder if Pearl Jam has only lasted two or three albums but Vedder’s solo career had been fairly successful. That’s who Cooper based him on, sort of. Lukas Nelson did most of the music, so it could be somebody like him or Shooter Jennings. but the film suggests Maine is super famous. I don’t know of any roots rock performers who are quite that famous these days except some older guys whose popularity peaked at least 30 years ago, like Neil Young.

[Ginger Yellow]

Anyone else have impressions of Snowpiercer? The reviews I saw were all pretty unimpressed, the set-up seems to be a particularly uninteresting use of the movie's premise, and on another very genre TV-friendly forum I frequent the relevant thread has zero responses, so I'm not exactly getting my hopes up.

[Hot Pepsi]

I don’t get that channel, so I don’t know. I’m not hearing great things.

[Sits]

I'm not sure this will get much traction on OTF, and realise its connections to reality are pretty tenuous, but we've just watched the first couple of episodes of The Great and it's really good fun. Although when Mrs. S pointed out that Elle Fanning was the 2-year-old in I Am Sam it was a bit of a shock. It looks as though they had fun making it.

Elsewhere, Series 2 of Top of the Lake has improved as it's gone along, but it's not an easy watch at times. Elisabeth Moss as reliable as ever.

[ad hoc]

Just finished the third (recently released) season of Bordertown (it;s called Sorjonen in the original Finnish). The first few episodes of series 3 I felt maybe it had lost the plot a bit, but actually the second half of the series was really excellent. I'd heartily recommend it to anyone (Netflix)

Now we've started something called the Valhalla Murders which appears to be an Icelandic/Norwegian coproduction. First episode did enough to keep us watching at least.

[pebblethefish]

For years I've mocked the US for having such long series of everything - why do you need 20+ episodes in a season?

Last night I finished watching Upload, a ten parter, and was very much "Why are you stopping now?? It was just getting good!"

Worth watching purely for the lead actress if nothing else, who is brilliant in every scene.

[hobbes]

So SyFy have been trailing a show called Pandora and from the teasers it looked really good. Like a cross between Killjoys and Dark Matter.

It's not. It's fucking terrible. Badly paced, fist-gbawingly scripted and filmed on location in Some scrubland off the M5 it appears.

[Ginger Yellow]

from the teasers it looked really good

Surely you've learned by now that trailers are no indication of a movie/show's quality, or even content.

[Nocturnal Submission]

Surely you've learned by now that trailers are no indication of a movie/show's quality, or even content.

I don't know why, but trailers tend to put me off a new series a lot more often than they attract me to one, which is why I invariably discover something terrific long after everyone else has done so.

[WOM]

Very much enjoying the FX drama Mrs America. It's a 10 parter about how Phyllis Schlaffly and co. set out to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment in the '70s. Almost exclusively a female cast, it shows the divide between Conservative east coast America and the maturing '60s hippies (Gloria Steinem, et al) who wanted the ERA written into the constitution. Cate Blanchette, Rose Byrne, Sarah Paulson, Tracey Ullman, Elizabeth Banks are just a few of the leads.

[Belhaven]

I did check out Phyllis Schlaffly on youtube and she comes across as a ten times more terrible person in real life than she is in the series.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Very much enjoying the FX drama Mrs America. It's a 10 parter about how Phyllis Schlaffly and co. set out to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment in the '70s. Almost exclusively a female cast, it shows the divide between Conservative east coast America and the maturing '60s hippies (Gloria Steinem, et al) who wanted the ERA written into the constitution. Cate Blanchette, Rose Byrne, Sarah Paulson, Tracey Ullman, Elizabeth Banks are just a few of the leads.

I'm a little disappointed TBH. As a series it seems a bit laboured. But the performances are excellent, particularly Blanchett's.

Gloria isn't happy:

[ursus arctos]

She was an absolutely awful human who bears a great deal of responsibility for the rancid state of politics in this country.

[Hot Pepsi]

For years I've mocked the US for having such long series of everything - why do you need 20+ episodes in a season?

Last night I finished watching Upload, a ten parter, and was very much "Why are you stopping now?? It was just getting good!"

Worth watching purely for the lead actress if nothing else, who is brilliant in every scene.

I really liked that too.

Standard network series are that long because they are on almost every week from September or October through April or May. That’s how they maximize ad revenue.

But that’s changing as more and more shows are made directly for streaming platforms and critics and fans have realized that eight to 12 episodes per season is usually the ideal number.

[matt j]

She was an absolutely awful human who bears a great deal of responsibility for the rancid state of politics in this country.

This, and I'm still kind of disgusted we've gotten a series focused on her, rather than... I don't know, literally anybody else of note from the same era. But I suppose since I haven't watched it, and probably won't watch it, it's possible they reveal the actual depths of her horribleness by season's end.

(There is a whole discussion to be had about how portraying anything 'sympathetically' is a huge win for Schlaffly's side. See American History X, Wall Street, the songs from Strike up the Band, etc...)

[WOM]

Oh, I wouldn't suggest she's portrayed sympathetically.

[Hot Pepsi]

I can’t watch that. It will just make me mad. But I love Cate Blanchett.

[Amor de Cosmos]

She is in no way portrayed sympathetically. Except, perhaps towards her gay son (but even that makes her a hypocrite.) She's manipulative and narcissistic, an absolutely dreadful personality. Blanchett reveals the rage beneath the entitlement superbly

[WOM]

The whole symbiotic / toxic / Stepford relationship with her husband is great, too.

[White No Sugar]

Anyone else have impressions of Snowpiercer? The reviews I saw were all pretty unimpressed, the set-up seems to be a particularly uninteresting use of the movie's premise, and on another very genre TV-friendly forum I frequent the relevant thread has zero responses, so I'm not exactly getting my hopes up.

Oh it’s rubbish alright. But enjoyable.

[Amor de Cosmos]

The whole symbiotic / toxic / Stepford relationship with her husband is great, too.

Yeah. That kinda stuff is the show's strength. I think it's weaker when it's showing the pro-ERA side. Probably because there are too many personalities involved, and there's not really enough time to develop any of them sufficiently.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Oh it’s rubbish alright. But enjoyable.

It is. I particularly like the actor in the fur coat who plays one of the bad-guys. Last seen as a CIA secretary in The Americans now she's got a Lancashire accent.

[slackster]

Family consensus saw us watching White Lines on Netflix. i bailed out after 4 increasingly preposterous episodes. There's some good actors in it, Ibiza and its clubbing scene makes a decent backdrop, but the solve-a-twenty-year-old -murder story is sub-standard Russell T Davies bollocks with characters and situations that are a mash up of Dynasty and Benidorm. The females in the house have decided it's so silly-bad its good for a laugh, but it's just frothy nonsense that just made me angry in the end.

[Ginger Yellow]

Not sure why that came as a surprise. That's exactly what it looks like from the description on Netflix.

[pebblethefish]

Having finished all three of the series I was watching (Upload, Buffy, Upstart Crow) at the weekend, I have been listlessly flicking around looking for something new to start on. I chanced upon The Tribe on Amazon Prime, and I would thoroughly recommend watching one episode just purely to see some absolutely terrible TV, which seems to have been written by a hyperactive 14 year old who still plays war games

The premise is that all the adults die for no apparent reason in the first 30 seconds, so obviously all the kids form violent street gangs (it's not clear whether the "action" is set a week after everyone dies, or five years. I'm not sure that anyone cares). They all sport tattoos that have been added with marker pen, and you can tell that they're all cool because they all either wear stompy Doc Martens (of which there are a lot of close-ups) or rollerblades. The action involves a good street girl being chased by some bad street kids, who are then trapped by a random nerd (you can tell he's a nerd because he wears glasses) but the bad street kids are on the run from some even worse street kids, whose leader travels standing up in a car and dresses alarmingly like a member of the SS. His gang at one point burn lots of books while chanting "No teachers! No schools! No books!" in a way that really must have embarrassed the actors involved. And because it was made in Australia in the 90s, it has a drippy theme song that even the makers of Home and Away would have rejected.

Seriously, have a few beers and watch an episode - it's not often you get a chance to say "No, seriously, I genuinely COULD have done better than this"