Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Loud Whispers]

It's a... time-piece, I guess I could improvise a genre, about Italy in the post-WW2 decades, as seen from the perspective of the intellectually gifted girl Elena "Lenu" Greco who grows up in the Neapolitan slums. Topically it's about nationalism (Neapolitan vs (north) Italian) and national identity and national shame, class struggle and class guilt, fascism and socialism and feminism, the nature of the mafia's relationship with the lower class that they prey on, and Lenu's fellow children/youths of the slum, and of course her complicated relationship with her complicated titular friend.

Great production values, great actors, very relatable characters, made by HBO together with an Italian network in the Italian language (or Neapolitan? I wouldn't be able to tell). Based on the trilogy by Helena Ferrante, a supposed autobiographical trilogy written under a pseudonym that's still a secret; allegedly great books in themselves but I have not read them.

I got gifted this book for Christmas. Ere we gooooo

[Robsoie]

I started to watch Sweet Tooth and so far i like this a lot, the contrast between the child full of hope regardless of the situation and the darkness of the world really works.

It's also helped by the actors being very good and believable in their roles, despite the crazy settings they're going through.
Hopefully the series lives up to that first few episodes i watched.

Really needed to watch something that good after that utterly idiotic and ridiculous Blood Origins series.

[Jopax]

So let's talk Alice in Borderland, a show that makes you go, holy shit this is way too anime for its own good, and then you learn that it's based on a manga and it all makes sense.

And in classic anime/manga fashion, the premise is interesting, the mystery is hella engaging and some of the games and setpieces are really cool. Unfortunately it's kinda let down by the anime-as-fuck characters which are little more than single-note tropes that spout utter nonsense at times. Now, when you're reading a manga or watching an anime, that sort of stuff kinda gets a pass, you expect archetypes, easily identifiable characters, over the top emotions and reactions because subtlety and body language aren't a thing in those mediums for the most parts (plus, y'know, the target audience is generally the younger folks).

Seeing that shit in a live-action show tho just feels off. Like, uncanny valley levels of off. Like, these are people, they generally act and talk like people would, but then they do or say something that no actual person would, but is something you'd expect from an anime protag spouting about not giving up or friendship or their ideals or what have you and the suspension of disbelief kinda shatters.

But you go trough with it, because like I said before, overall, it's not a bad show, it has more good stuff than bad, and you really wanna find out just what the hell is going on here. But then you get to a particular episode and you just literally ragequit the show halfway trough it because this shit is so fucking dumb.

Spoiler: spoilers for the second season ahead (click to show/hide)

So after a bunch of hijinks and individual adventures the majority of the gang had, they all somehow end up in the same location, being hunted by the king of spades, the ultimate physical challenge (literally a super mercenary that has a bunch of ammo and body armor and guns down everyone in sight). The gang all have weapons of their own for the most part, one even has a home-made grenade. So instead of going, hey, we should set up an ambush and gun this fucker down because after all he's just a single dude they go for the main dudes idiotic plan of filling a random drugstore with spray can gas, luring the king in there by using the other five people in the group as bait and then using the homemade grenade to blow the whole thing up.
Cue an epic fight scene that grows more and more desperate, with folks you've been following for a better part of two seasons now sacrificing themselves to beat this fucking guy, with occasional cuts to our main guy with the plan running around a drugstore and spraying a bunch of cans empty. And as literally everyone is either killed or horribly maimed you can't help but think, man, if only they had one extra fucking person with a fucking shotgun to help out here, that would be so neat so maybe not everyone would have to die here.
Now, this alone probably wouldn't be enough to tilt me into quitting the show then and there, but this whole thing is preceded by an encounter with one of the antagonist who is literally a psychopath piece of shit, who, in the very same episode states: "I will make everyone I meet regret meeting me and when I die I will go straight to hell"
In that encounter he picks a fight with the mc and another dude we've been following and after lethally wounding the latter and getting shot by the former the dude asks them to not consider him the villain because he only seems like an evil piece of shit because he's in the minority, and if the tables were somehow turned and the world was populated with psychopathic monsters they would be the ones considered evil.

Now, I haven't read the source material in question so I can't confirm my suspicions, but there's so many scenes that feel like they've been lifted straight from a manga or anime that I can't help but think that this would've been so much better if they didn't blindly stick to the original work and instead tried to adapt it a bit more to the medium.

[Il Palazzo]

So, on recommendation from Red Letter Media, I went and watched the second season of White Lotus (HBO). Turned out to be one of the sharpest shows I've ever seen.
It's sort of framed as a whodunnit in an Italian resort, but it's just the background. The meat is in very incisive probing of human romantic/sexual relations. And the writing here is top-notch.
Its so refreshingly not preachy nor judgemental. Almost feels like a documentary, shot in a jungle, to be narrated by David Attenborough. There's this vaguely unsettling imagery throughout, like a less dark 'The Lighthouse', suggestive of something simmering under the skin of things.
A most excellent mini-series (each season is apparently a self-contained story, and I haven't seen the first). Providing one's more into character drama than high-concept epics.
For something that opens with a discovery of an unspecified number of dead bodies, it ends up surprisingly life-affirming. I give it 10 humanities out of 10 existential dreads.

[Folly]

I finished watching the third and final season of His Dark Materials(serialization of The Golden Compass).

Many of the big events this season seemed to hinge upon major coincidences and random new rules being shoehorned in just to push the story in a different direction. Still, a grand journey was effectively depicted and I rather enjoyed it.

There are materials in the novels for spin-offs to potentially be made, and the ending credits left the door open for such. I hope to see those one day.


I also recently finished the first season of The Peripheral.

This is the story of a blonde southern gamer-girl whose skills attract the attention of forces-from-beyond, leading her down a rabbit hole that will end up changing her entire world view.
It's pretty well done, with several unexpected twists and big revelations. The season ended at a rather unsatisfying point though, right in the middle of an event arc. I hope that it gets renewed so that I can see more.

[McTraveller]

Willow

WTF.  It's like a trainwreck I can't stop watching.

Among the most minor concerns are... what is with the modern emo music playing in a magic fantasy show, complete with lyrics?

About the only good thing about it so far is that

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The characters playing Madmartigan's children actually look like they could be Madmartigan's children.

That should be indicative of the overall thing, if that is what constitutes a "good" part.

Story is ridiculous, characters are stereotypes, acting is campy... but it's not fun like the original movie.

[Starver]

Willow is one of those things that has very-nearly-but-not-half-so-nearly-enough pursuaded me to sign up with the respectively hosting service. Though of course Trailers Lie, which easily takes sufficient edge off my longing.

(And one of my good friends on a BBS, that I used to basically live on, used the screen name of Madmartigan, so it's a double dose of nostalgia.)

[McTraveller]

I only have Disney+ because I get it "free" with my phone service.

Do NOT get it for Willow. You will cry.  It does NOT hit nostalgia at all.  It's like it is written by people trying to elicit nostalgia but have never experienced it themselves.  Basically all the elements of nostalgia are literal clips of the movie.

[Great Order]

So the first episode of The Last of Us came out on the 15th.

Quite enjoyed it myself. A bit of expansion in some areas and contraction in others, enough changes to keep it fresh but not enough to be unfaithful to the original.

[King Zultan]

From what I saw of the trailer it appeared to be a retelling of the first game and its DLC, is there more to it than that?

[Great Order]

Nah, that's what it is. Although we're one episode in so any larger changes aren't gonna be obvious until later if they're there.

[King Zultan]

Since that's the case I'll already know how it ends but since I enjoyed the game I'll probably watch it at some point.

[nenjin]

So, on recommendation from Red Letter Media, I went and watched the second season of White Lotus (HBO). Turned out to be one of the sharpest shows I've ever seen.
It's sort of framed as a whodunnit in an Italian resort, but it's just the background. The meat is in very incisive probing of human romantic/sexual relations. And the writing here is top-notch.
Its so refreshingly not preachy nor judgemental. Almost feels like a documentary, shot in a jungle, to be narrated by David Attenborough. There's this vaguely unsettling imagery throughout, like a less dark 'The Lighthouse', suggestive of something simmering under the skin of things.
A most excellent mini-series (each season is apparently a self-contained story, and I haven't seen the first). Providing one's more into character drama than high-concept epics.
For something that opens with a discovery of an unspecified number of dead bodies, it ends up surprisingly life-affirming. I give it 10 humanities out of 10 existential dreads.

I saw it on HBO over various work trips and assumed it was some sort of Bravo-style drama about rich people being bad and decadent and yadda yadda.

Then I saw the RLM review. I don't really think I'll watch it but I guess I'm glad to know it was more than surface level smut. Although I understand that S2 is generally better than S1.

[Vector]

1984, Jeremy Brett's portrayal of Sherlock Holmes ;_;

[Starver]

Iconic.

But, while it's not TV, the Clive Merrison and Michael Williams compilation of every singles Holmes story (and the Clive Merrison/Andrew Sachs "original sequels") is probably worth listening to, if you can.  The same not-Sherlock/not-Elementary/uncontemporised[1] properly era-tied setting, and of course the Pictures Are Better On Radio...

And, as general canon-spinoff, I think the Lestrade/everybody-but-Holmes series The Rivals[2] might interest you (a mixed bag, by dint of the "guest Investigator Of The Week" format, if nothing else, but if you like the setting and want variety, it's worth the odd half hour at a time, I think. (Currently onpy available to listen, if at all, is the series they changed the voice-actor, for availability rrasons. Tim Piggot-Smith isn't bad, but I think James Fleet did it well enough for me.)


All this just being for media variety, perhaps. Perhaps not strictly on-topic.


[1] Indeed, also not futurised!!!

[2] Giving you the direct BBC link there, whether or not it's useful, because aside from the much earlier TV series (that I have never seen, so have no reason to recommend) and a mention under Lestrade's own wikipage "radiography", I could not find any particularly useful encyclopedic link to give.