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    I've finally caught up on Silicon Valley. It might be my very favourite thing on TV at the moment. I love all the characters. Lori, Gilfoyle, Ehrlich, Jared, all of them are just so funny, and lots of them feel like versions of people I've met in real life

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      Alias Grace concluded this past weekend. The CBC did a darn fine job with it I thought. The adaptation called for a strong dose of Upper Canada Gothic and no one's better equipped for that than the Mothercorp.

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        The "Meet the Lords" three-parter on BBC2 (part 2 tonight at 7pm), have just watched bits of it, a bit sickening overall but very watchable I thought, well the bits I watched anyway.

        Had a good laugh when the 97 year-old (!) Lord Carrington enters the Palace of Westminster pushing his Zimmer frame and the doorkeeper says (roughly): "Well, yes he is old but his mind is great, he has fantastic knowledge and great life experience." (which I’m not disputing but bloody hell, 97!!!).

        Here, at 4’50: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episod...ning-the-club#

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          One of Us on Netflix. A fascinating window into the world of the Hasidim and how they have an almost Scientologist approach to disconnecting from those that leave.

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            Ended up watching HBO's Rolling Stone; Stories from the Edge. I expected a four hour Wenner-wank but, fortunately, it wasn't quite that. It didn't seem quite sure what it was TBH. Structurally it covered the history of the mag through it's best known writers, and the biggest stories they covered, both successes and failures. Which could be interesting, but seemed lacking in focus somehow. I'm guessing it won't find a lot of traction beyond people like me, for whom the magazine was essential reading during it's first decade or so. I guess if there is a PoV it's about how difficult it is to stay young while getting old and rich.

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              Originally posted by Kev7 View Post
              The "Meet the Lords" three-parter on BBC2 (part 2 tonight at 7pm), have just watched bits of it, a bit sickening overall but very watchable I thought, well the bits I watched anyway.

              Had a good laugh when the 97 year-old (!) Lord Carrington enters the Palace of Westminster pushing his Zimmer frame and the doorkeeper says (roughly): "Well, yes he is old but his mind is great, he has fantastic knowledge and great life experience." (which I’m not disputing but bloody hell, 97!!!).

              Here, at 4’50: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episod...ning-the-club#
              Having just followed the link, to be fair he's not pushing a Zimmer but walking with the moderate aid of one stick. You'd probably knock a good decade off that age if you didn't know.

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                Not sure after all if it’s 97 year-old Lord Carrington with the zimmer frame but if you watch at 4’55, there’s defo a lord using a Zimmer frame to enter Westminster Palace (the doorkeeper says "Good morning lord").

                Mind, until a few weeks ago, we had the farcically corrupt multi-billionaire Serge Dassault in the French senate, he is 92… And he only very reluctantly gave up his seat after losing his senatorial immunity and being banned earlier this year from holding a role in public office after a string of financial and political scandals finally caught up with him, otherwise I'm sure sure he’s still be there. He could have appealed and delayed the whole process but he gauged that he'd lost the vital support necessary to be re-elected a senator in the senatorial election 2 months ago, so he packed it in (unlike députés, senators are elected through indirect universal suffrage by "grands électeurs", essentially an electoral college composed of députés, senators, regional councillors and county councillors). Some of these scandals were worthy of a banana republic, eg for 15 years he bribed people to vote for him as a mayor of Corbeil-Essonnes (south of Paris) and he is thought to have given up to €60m to local voters and associations! It came to a head when members of the local underworld – drug dealers etc. – took to regularly go and harass him at the local town hall to claim ever-increasing bundles of dosh (it was given in plastic bags...) and Dassault ended up being physically threatened when he tried to stop the cycle. There was so much money being distributed willy-nilly in this mid-sized town that it triggered a gang war with vicious assaults, broad daylight shootings etc. that lasted years. One of Dassault’s goons, Younès Bounouara, to whom Père Noël Dassault gave at least €2m in protection money, was sent to jail for 15 years in 2016 for having nearly killed a blackmailer.

                http://en.rfi.fr/economy/20140211-sh...-custody-vote-

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                  Originally posted by Amor de Cosmos View Post
                  Alias Grace concluded this past weekend. The CBC did a darn fine job with it I thought. The adaptation called for a strong dose of Upper Canada Gothic and no one's better equipped for that than the Mothercorp.
                  Thanks for that tip. We watched it over the last couple of evenings - so good it even got Mrs Flibl to stop messaging on her phone! Having watched this and The Handmaid's Tale I'm definitely adding Margaret Atwood's work to my "To Read" list.

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                    I watched Loving Vincent at a local arts cinema tonight. It's an animated film set a year after Van Gogh's death as one of the people he painted tries to find out why he committed suicide. The film itself is hand-painted animation, much of it in a Van Gogh style. Most of the characters are drawn from his paintings.

                    It's very interesting. Raises the question whether Vincent was murdered. Most of the characters are people he painted and there is a postscript with their real paintings and sometimes photographs as well.

                    Well worth a look, imo.

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                      Anyone here watch The Leftovers? We just watched its third and final season, and it was well worth the time. Season 1 was interesting, Season 2....I had no idea where it was going. But 3 was very satisfying.

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                        I enjoyed The Leftover a lot, although Season 1 was much more interesting than the following ones. Season 1 it felt more like how normal people try and survive in a world where totally weird shit has happened. Seasons 2 and 3 got more mystical and religious, and played more on the superstition element, and as a result were less interesting, to me.

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                          Totally unrelated, but if you have 9 minutes and 48 seconds, this is absurdly dry and funny.

                          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzKehvXNBus

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                            I quite enjoyed part 1 of "Trump, an American Dream" on Channel 4 this week, watchable here: http://www.channel4.com/programmes/t...mand/66220-001

                            mainly for this (Sunday Times review), "This was as much an economic history of New York in the 1970s as it was of Trump; with Nixon gone, the Vietnam War lost and the city skint. But it was key to show the climate in which Trump flourished, securing tax breaks to build luxury hotels and publicly ridiculing anyone who challenged him."

                            Reminded me of when I first went to the US, in 1984, and stayed in New-York for over a week, before heading to Maine where I did some volunteer work via an international programme. New-York felt raw, edgy, seedy, it was like a war zone in some places that were almost slap bang in the middle of Manhattan. I was told not to go to the Bowery (and Stuyvesant areas I think it was) but I was staying nearby in the Washington Sq area and curiosity got the better of me… I had the fright of my life. New-York really was the Big, bad, rotten Apple.

                            I can see how someone like Trump positively thrived in that toxic, lawless environment, especially with Roy Cohn as a sidekick. I recently read about the role Cohn played during McCarthyism in a French magazine article on the subject and I now fully understand what ursus meant when he wrote last January that "Cohn was one of the most truly evil public figures of the 20th Century in the US".

                            3 more episodes to follow. I really hope they show the horrendous mess that Trump left behind him in Atlantic City (an abject failure that should have meant the end of him), that seems to be hardly ever mentioned in the British and French media.

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                              Originally posted by Patrick Thistle View Post
                              I watched Loving Vincent at a local arts cinema tonight. It's an animated film set a year after Van Gogh's death as one of the people he painted tries to find out why he committed suicide. The film itself is hand-painted animation, much of it in a Van Gogh style. Most of the characters are drawn from his paintings.

                              It's very interesting. Raises the question whether Vincent was murdered. Most of the characters are people he painted and there is a postscript with their real paintings and sometimes photographs as well.

                              Well worth a look, imo.
                              I’m no great fan of animated films but will defo go and see this one at some point or buy the DVD, it looks visually stunning (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rhax6TJnWBU).

                              What did you make of the script and story PT? (I’ve heard they’re on the weak side).

                              I love films about artists or involving art/literature, especially when these films happen to be woven into childhood or old memories or into other special moments of one’s life, memories of close relatives/friends who may be gone or "absent" through old age/dementia etc., it can be so emotionally potent, real emotional dynamite (eg Going to the Rodin museum in Paris with my family after watching the 1988 masterpiece Camille Claudel, starring the sublime Isabelle Adjani and the – it pains me to say – impossibly-talented Gérard Depardieu. How Adjani didn’t win a Best Actress Oscar for this film is beyond me, although she came close.)

                              There have long been speculations surrounding Van Gogh’s death (since the 1930’s and the work of the American art historian John Rewald), the circumstances of which are most troubling (but unconventional deaths are legion, especially when viewed through our 21st century eyes and perspective).

                              In Van Gogh: The Life (2011), Steven Naifeg and Gregory White Smith develop an alternative hypothesis in which Van Gogh did not commit suicide, but rather was a possible victim of manslaughter or foul play, involving two teenagers.

                              I haven’t read their huge book (900 pages) so I can’t comment on their work but I don’t find the murder theory that convincing (also, see #4 here: https://www.vangoghdeath.com/suspects).

                              However, Naifeg and White Smith appear in this interesting programme (part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKtFM3J_At8 and part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_RA_M6SjzY) and they certainly raise a few interesting questions and points, especially in the light of what we (think we) know about this strange René Secrétan character, one of the teenagers possibly involved in Van Gogh’s death and a known tormentor (that bit is ascertained AFAIK) of the Dutch artist at Auvers-sur-Oise where his wealthy Parisian parents had a country house. An accident (after a tussle for instance), or some sort of prank gone horribly wrong, is more likely than a murder IMO. Conversely, there are plenty of elements elsewhere that make the suicide theory very plausible, albeit not a terribly straightforward one.

                              These 2 articles are both interesting:

                              https://www.rappler.com/life-and-sty...sanity-gun-ear

                              https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2...murder-mystery

                              as is "A death in Auvers":

                              https://www.vangoghdeath.com/death-in-auvers-1

                              https://www.vangoghdeath.com/death-in-auvers-2

                              https://www.vangoghdeath.com/death-in-auvers-3

                              https://www.vangoghdeath.com/death-in-auvers-4

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                                Did anyone watch Gone to Pot - American Road Trip?

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                                  PT, if you like art films/biopics on artists, try to watch Cézanne et Moi (recently released on DVD, English subtitles) with Guillaume Gallienne as Paul Cézanne and Guillaume Canet as Émile Zola. (Gallienne is arguably one of France’s most talented actors. Canet is a good too but sadly for him, he is more famous as Marion Cotillard’s partner. He is a director too and directed the superb 2006 thriller Tell no one based on the eponymous Harlan Coben’s best-seller.)

                                  I watched Cézanne et Moi a few days ago, extremely watchable IMO. The reviews weren’t universally rapturous in the French media (but that’s hardly surprising, "too mainstream", "not thorough enough" or "too full of Images d’Épinal" I presume for many of them, the likes of Les Cahiers du Cinéma, who slated it, as did Le Figaro, Libération, Télérama, Paris Match etc… bunch of jumped-up bourgeois vulgarians the lot of them) and foreign media alike or online but don’t be put off by the poor or average reviews you may come across: the excoriators of this film are wrong. It’s not a masterpiece but still a damn good biopic.

                                  However, it goes without saying that you don’t approach this as you would any other film. In keeping with most art biopics or films on art, you really need to have at least a modicum of knowledge about the characters, their life, their background, their interaction etc. In this case, knowing a bit about Cézanne and Zola or their artistic era, about the beginnings of Impressionism (and how controversial it was), about their tumultuous friendship (unfolding into a full-blown rivalry over the years as their respective paths and fortune dramatically diverge), where they grew up etc. certainly helps to make sense of the various flashbacks throughout the film that, granted, can be a little discombobulating as the story jumps back and forth through place and time on a few occasions (the storyline would have benefited from a more linear structure but it is still a cracking watch). Beautiful photography and glorious provençal outdoor scenes and light.

                                  The New York Times reviewer gets it spot on IMO:

                                  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/m...rrer=google_kp

                                  This is good too (although partial it has to be said as it’s an advertorial):

                                  https://www.theguardian.com/french-f...d-the-break-up

                                  The trailer (with English subtitles):



                                  (note the blooper at 1’41: Cézanne and Zola contemplating the magnificent scenery with, in the foreground, Bimont Lake, and its dam, sitting at the foothills of the iconic Sainte-Victoire Mountain that inspired many of Cézanne’s paintings… All very delightfully bucolic and unspoilt except that there was no hydro-electric dam there in Cézanne’s time, it was built just after WWII. Maybe it was a nod to Émile Zola as his father, François Zola, was the chief architect for the construction of a groundbreaking dam near Aix-en-Provence in the 1840’s, now called the Zola Dam)

                                  Last edited by Pérou Flaquettes; 15-11-2017, 21:35.

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                                    The script for Loving Vincent is exposition mainly. It felt quite stage play. I wasn't convinced by the mix of accents in the vocal cast, Chris O'Dowd grated more than the others.

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                                      'Big Eyes' with Christoph Waltz and Amy Adams is another film about artists that I watched a few months ago. It's a Tim Burton movie. Not that that means much any more.

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                                        Thanks for the reply and the info on "Big Eyes", will check it out.

                                        Witnesses Season 2 coming to BBC4 (net Saturday)

                                        Season 1 of this French Scandi noir was gripping I thought (Channel 4, 2015). Very atmospheric, great footage of Le Tréport and its quaint funicular that cuts through the limestone rock to emerge at the top of the cliffs where there are shops, restaurants, tourist office etc. unique in Europe apparently.

                                        Audrey Fleurot (of Untouchable and Spiral fame, was also in the excellent Midnight in Paris) replaces the great Thierry Lhermitte as Marie Dompnier’s detective partner (lieutenant Sandra Winckler in the series).

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                                          Coincidentally finished watching Witnesses II last night (on Netflix). It's up to snuff with the first series. The strength of both is in the "set-up" I think, The "house" in the first series (avoiding spoilers) is replaced by something equally grim and bizarre in the second. After that, though gripping enough, it's all fairly predictable with a couple of low-level irritations. In the first season it was Dompnier running around constantly in five inch heels (which are clearly, and sensibly, de rigeur for female detectives.) In this series I found myself muttering "call for back-up, why doesn't she just call for back-up," several times an episode.

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                                            I'm watching the darts.

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                                              Originally posted by Amor de Cosmos View Post
                                              Coincidentally finished watching Witnesses II last night (on Netflix). It's up to snuff with the first series. The strength of both is in the "set-up" I think, The "house" in the first series (avoiding spoilers) is replaced by something equally grim and bizarre in the second. After that, though gripping enough, it's all fairly predictable with a couple of low-level irritations. In the first season it was Dompnier running around constantly in five inch heels (which are clearly, and sensibly, de rigeur for female detectives.) In this series I found myself muttering "call for back-up, why doesn't she just call for back-up," several times an episode.
                                              I’ve seen it too… (on French TV), so I’ll keep schtum…

                                              I’ve quite liked I know who you are (Sé quién eres) that finished yesterday on BBC4 (although the first series was dreadfully slow and light on plot) – not least because it’s been great for my Spanish, and that's potentially very useful for Brexiting reasons! - and I really hope that Channel 4 & the Beeb will keep buying these good foreign-language series (and subtitle them, which is unfortunately not a given, eg Arte which stupidly dub 75% of their English & Spanish stuff, a great shame).

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                                                The pictures on Blue Planet II are nice but the music and script (style rather than subject matter) make it a bit of a slog to sit through.

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                                                  Watched Netflix's new animated show, "Big Mouth", on a whim and without knowing anything about it.

                                                  It's absolutely hilarious, very rude but a brilliantly accurate portrayal of puberty and being a teenager.

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                                                    Stuck on You - The Football Sticker Story

                                                    Tonight at 8pm on ITV4 (repeat from last Tuesday).

                                                    Watchable here: https://www.itv.com/hub/stuck-on-you...ry/2a5477a0001

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