Current Watching

[Cal Alamein]

OUATIA is neither a Western nor a Clint Eastwood film. OUATITW is a great Western, but also without Eastwood.

D'oh! I did know that.

[Hot Pepsi]

The former has the equally right-wing James Woods in perhaps his best ever role, but the sexual violence in the movie is unacceptable.

Yeah. James Woods is a disqualifier. And he's actually way worse than Eastwood, both as a person and an actor.

I've seen OUATIA.

[Fussbudget]

Caught up on a couple of things mentioned earlier in the thread. Killing Eve was entertaining enough but not a patch on Fleabag. I didn't care much for any of the characters (though Jodie Comer's performance is a lot of fun), mostly I think due to the weirdly flippant changes in tone throughout. Also there is TOO MUCH music in that show and it's TOO LOUD and always unsubtly telling you about the plot or the character's state of mind through VERY LITERAL LYRICS ugh ugh ugh. Anyway it wasn't bad but still vaguely disappointing given all the praise it's received.

Maniac had a lot of problems and the comedy was a bit broad for my liking at times (so many hilarious wigs and comedy accents), but I really enjoyed it. Jonah Hill was very good in it I thought, he reminded me quite a bit of Adam Sandler in Punch Drunk Love.

[Vicarious Thrillseeker]

I started the new season of Man In The High Castle today. After watching the first episode, I think it's off to a great start and I would really like to binge the whole thing right now, but this apartment won't clean itself (much to my perpetual annoyance).

I'm bingeing - up to episode 7 already.

[Ginger Yellow]

I'm still in two minds about Maniac. I love the sort of Alien inspired art direction, and certain individual scenes, but I'm not engaging withe the overall stories or characters at all

[Amor de Cosmos]

Four episodes in I'm not getting fully behind Maniac either. It's OK, but that's the most positive thing I can say about it. Like Ozark there's a feeling of predictability about the characters and, to some extent, the plot — though I kinda like the two project managers.

I'm not seeing much that has my crank turning quickly at the moment. Kidding, The Deuce, The Good Place, and Better Call Saul are about as good as gets. There's a new Spanish show, Elites with possibilities. It's has many of the same people as La Casa de Papel which I enjoyed a lot.

[Satchmo Distel]

I gave up on Borderlander. Just too unbelievable. I know his motivation is to protect his brother's kids rather than the brother but the risks he takes for that purpose seem odd, as is the fact that nobody notices the conflict of interest (at least up to the episode I stopped at).

[Hot Pepsi]

I'm digging the Netflix series The Toys That Made Us about the history of great toy lines - well, clearly this is made by a guy in his forties, so toys that we remember fondly. I'm fond of the Star Wars one because I actually got to tour a factory in Cincinnati that made toy sandspeeders. These days, it seems remarkable that anything like that was manufactured in the US, but Kenner was actually based in Cincinnati in the Kroger building (it was later absorbed into Hasbro and no longer has offices there).

I also like the Masters of the Universe one. There already was a whole documentary on this, but this telling of the story is better. The editing just makes it sound more exciting.

The story behind Masters of the Universe is exactly what you'd expect, btw. But I was into it for a while.

[Femme Folle]

I'm bingeing - up to episode 7 already.

I have two episodes to go, but I'm saving them for the weekend. I know I'll be sad when I've finished it and have no more episodes to watch. Giles Pantone, who plays the Propagandaminister, has told me on Twitter that filming is already in progress for season 4.

[Benjm]

I've very much enjoyed Mystery Road, the Australian crime drama that has just finished on BBC4. It's a spin off from the film of the same name. Beautiful outback photography, strong performances and thoughtful treatment of themes of power and abuse. The opening episodes (of six) should still be on the iplayer.

[San Bernardhinault]

I've managed to get three episodes into a show called "Manifest" about a plane which lands a few years after it departs, on one of the US Networks. It is absolute by the numbers post-Lost pseudo-science mystery-at-the-core never-actually-reveal-anything dogshit. The main protagonists are all remarkably young, and one is - entirely coincidentally - a cop while another is a brilliant medical scientist. I'll stick through season one, I think, but it is pretty much unadulterated crap that could have been generated by an AI that has watched a bit of CNN and late evening Network TV over the last 4 years.

[Hot Pepsi]

I started watching Once Upon a Time in The West.

It does have that "wow, this is moving at a glacial pace" feel that I get from so many pre-80s movies, as we discussed on the "things I don't get" thread. I'm not sure if I should just stick with it as a psychological exercise that will help me overcome my impatience - I was diagnosed with ADD not long ago, but I'm not sure that's true because I don't know if anyone really knows what ADD is - or if I need to just concede that anything made before 1985 isn't going to work for me.

I think I'll go with the former, but it's not easy. It would be easier if I could see these old films in the theater. At home, there are just too many potential distractions and it's too easy to say "I could be doing so many other things right now." At the theater there are a few factors that compel one to stay in the moment and just watch the movie. There are some "old films" that I really like - Casablanca, It's a Wonderful Life, Rear Window, to name a few, and I suppose it's not a coincidence that I've seen all of those on the big screen.

[Vicarious Thrillseeker]

I have two episodes to go, but I'm saving them for the weekend. I know I'll be sad when I've finished it and have no more episodes to watch. Giles Pantone, who plays the Propagandaminister, has told me on Twitter that filming is already in progress for season 4.

I finished it tonight. Really impressed, particularly the way they deal with multiverse and alternative reality theories. Can't wait for season 4 and more of Rufus Sewell in leather.

[Femme Folle]

Finished High Castle yesterday and can't wait for season 4.

I watched both available episodes of The Romanoffs (on Amazon). I was expecting a series more like Mad Men, but it's an anthology with different characters in each episode (and each episode having no connection to the others apart from having at least one character who claims they descended from the tsar). I will wait until I've seen a couple more episodes before I give up on it, but it's not looking great right now. The episodes are feature length, which would be nice if they didn't feel too long. There are plenty of shows out these days that would be fantastic at 90 minutes each, but these two episodes felt long for the sake of squeezing in more scenery and not more substance. It's really too bad, but maybe things will improve with the next episodes.

[matt j]

I'm not sure where to put this (sport? world?). But this:

https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes...132644465.html

A short film on surfers in Sierra Leone.

[WOM]

Bruce Brown's legendary surf film Endless Summer beat them to the punch by about 40 years. In it, Brown films young American surfers doing a lap around Africa, hitting Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa. In some of the most astoundingly tone-deaf racial voiceover (played for laughs), the guys turn their boards over to the natives/darkies/tribe/chief and let them have a go. I cringed watching, but I can only imagine the naive laughter back in '66.

[ursus arctos]

Those scenes made me very uncomfortable when I first saw the film in 68 or 69, but that wasn't the case for the large majority of the audience.

[WOM]

I was quite...I dunno...shocked maybe. The more I thought about it, the more astounded I was. It was totally 1930s humor...not 1960s. It's not like most Americans hadn't met black people at that point.

The only saving grace was that Mrs WOM wasn't watching it with me. She either have been crying or screaming, and neither is recommended.

[ursus arctos]

The SoCal surfer dudes that Brown featured may genuinely not have. They wouldn't have been in Vietnam or university and those communities (and the scene in general) were lily white.

[WOM]

This is true. It's more Brown I blame, though. He's responsible for On Any Sunday, which, for obvious reasons, remains a high point in my doc-watching life. It had mercifully few ethno-cultural clangers, so maybe he'd grown a bit. That said, docs of this nature - Warren Miller films among them - are notorious for 'whacky' voiceovers that are very specific to the film maker's own vibe.

[San Bernardhinault]

I loved Endless Summer as a movie when I watched it - just the general low-key vibe of it, the music, the colour-tint. It felt like should be on endless loop in sun-dappled bars.

And yet... those scenes are so jarring and grating against the rest of it that you know you can't actually show it in public at all.

[Hot Pepsi]

I loved Endless Summer as a movie when I watched it - just the general low-key vibe of it, the music, the colour-tint. It felt like should be on endless loop in sun-dappled bars.

And yet... those scenes are so jarring and grating against the rest of it that you know you can't actually show it in public at all.

I have no memory of those scenes. I must have blocked them out. I also saw it about 25 years ago, right around the time of the release of Endless Summer II, which is very similar, except maybe less racist.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Yeah, me too. I saw it on its original UK release 52 years ago, and my memory of it is pretty much the same as as SB's.

[WOM]

Another neat one is an Aussie surf doc called To Ride A White Horse. It has an exceptional soundtrack by Sven Libaek, whose instrumentals I could listen to all day long.

Here if you're interested.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x90C...kUKRjlDqvcoagy

[ursus arctos]

Reed, I have a very vague recollection that the original was edited for the release of the sequel, so you might not have seen them.