Really enjoyed the comedy (?) “Vengeance” last night on Peacock, up until the ending. To me, the ending didn’t jive with the character Ben. But still an excellent film by B.J. North in his first feature film as writer-director, and he’s also the star. BJ North is like a younger Ben Stiller, but not so annoying. Maybe someone can tell me if the film’s portrayals of Texans and podcasters is way off-base or what.
After recently watching "Enola Holmes" and its sequel, I was impressed with its star Millie Bobby Brown as the younger sister of Sherlock Holmes. Millie Bobby Brown was a child actress on "Stranger Things" (which I've never watched). Now she stars in another Netflix film, as Elodie in "Damsel". I'm curious if any of you have an opinion on "Damsel". In Damsel, Elodie is a young woman who marries a prince in order to improve life in her village. But it's bait-and-switch, as the far-away kingdom needs to sacrifice princesses to their local dragon in order to maintain their wealth. Elodie of course fights her way out of the dragon's lair. The Guardian review pointed out that not only must the damsel rescue herself and her sister, but her stepmother helps, there is an evil Queen, and the dragon is female. Pretty much all the male leaders get killed off. The Guardian felt the film had a significantly feminist spin. Anyone agree? I prefer the earlier Millie Bobby Brown as a wise cracking brainiac sleuth who excels at martial arts while wearing a corset. In Damsel, I feel like she is less heroic because she runs around screaming so much. I compare her with Bruce Willis in Die Hard. Apparently, none of the big names would take that role because they felt the character was being a coward, running away and hiding from the terrorists. I guess the key differences are that Bruce Willis is cracking jokes the whole time, and that Die Hard was a Christmas movie.
HBOMax just released a documentary called “MoviePass MovieCrash”. I never used MoviePass, but apparently at least 3M people did. This amazingly good film shows how the company was started in SF in 2011 by 2 young Black guys (Stacy Spikes and Hamet Watt), but after several years only had 20,000 subscribers. In 2016-2017 they brought in 2 old White guys (Mitch Lowe who had worked at Netflix and Redbox, and VC Ted Farnsworth), who eventually took over the whole company and fired the founders. Ted Farnsworth pursued a classic pump-and-dump strategy that drove MoviePass stock up as they pursued 500M subscribers while bleeding over $200M cash annually. MoviePass went bankrupt in 2019. It’s just a great movie that shows Silicon Valley tech vibes, how easily we are betrayed by visionaries, how to pump up a stock, and how much subscribers and employees loved MoviePass.
Boy, have I been watching a lot of TV lately. I watched a really weird bilingual Spanish-language comedy series on HBOMax called "Los Espookys". Fred Armisen is the producer and plays Uncle Tico, a careerist parking valet. When he first appeared rattling off Spanish, it took me awhile to recognize him. Turns out Armisen is 1/2 Venezuelan and 1/4 Korean aristocracy. The 2-season series is mostly written by 2 comedians, Julio Torres and Ana Fabrega and is wacky as hell, leveraging telenovelas, supernatural, demons, and being inside the writers' weird brains. It is set in a fictional Latin country, altho Armisen works as a parking valet in LA until he loses his job to self-parking cars. There is also a bit with an American ambassador airhead who wants to influence the local prez election so that she can become ambassador to Miami, which she thinks is in a foreign country where she will take “weird meetings with conservative Latins.” Anyhow, i got to practice my Spanish a lot. There was a 3-year pandemic delay between the 1st and 2nd season, and it got cancelled after that at the end of 2022. But the 2nd season finale wraps up all the stories, actually quite surprisingly well. If you have HBOMax, it's quite a whack on the side of the head.
Well I finished all the walking deads and spinoffs... how anti climatic can you possibly get... terrible last 2 seasons of fmain show. Spinoffs were so meh.
Why do people watch such crappy shows? I remember years ago I was visiting a cousin who was watching that show and some old lady shot an arrow at a big white metal gas tank that was some distance away and it exploded.... that's the only thing I remember about it as it was so ridiculous. How did something so crap last like fifteen years? There are way too many zombie shows and movies and almost none of them are good. Even Jim Jarmusch couldn't come close to making a decent one. Pretty much the only good zombie movies of the 21st century are both from the same year, Sean of the Dead and (debatable) the Dawn of the Dead remake which is at least entertaining. Speaking of quality shows, this has been going around social media recently. I don't even know what the far right column is but how can whoever made this even include it in good conscience... A ranking of the 50 best television shows of all time, based on a cumulative score derived from IMDb users, Rotten Tomatoes critics and users, Metacritic users, and other sources pic.twitter.com/80Qn4JH4ek— CONSEQUENCE (@consequence) July 7, 2024
Interesting list. Ive only seen a handful of those. I stopped watching Breaking Bad because thr fans were too obsessed. Im surprised Baywatch isnt on that list. I read it was the most watched show world wide at its peak or something. My favorite show is Law and Order: SVU
I hate cop shows, lawyer shows, and hospital shows. That tends to limit my TV watching, which is fine by me because given the choice I'd rather play my guitar and sing anyway...
I don't like most of them, but I've found myself enjoying Chicago Fire / PD and of course I mentioned my favorite show is Law And Order SVU. I don't really watch much TV though, but I find 1 show, watch them on stream 1 at a time. SVU is the only one I watch weekly when new episodes come out since I'm all caught up with that show.
Watched Zone of Intrest last night. Great film - should have won best picture but no big stars. Beautiful movie that scars your soul. Night scenes were filmed with a night vision camera - a technique that worked really well.
People drove me to disliking the show because they were 'Breaking Bad' purists. If you dont know everything about everything and everyone and the backstory and what the directors asshole looks like /sarcasm they jumped all over your ass for not being a true fan. Plus people made it a point to spoil it for people so I just lost interest in it. Plus it never really appealed to me. I'm not much of a big TV show watcher anyways and go in spurts when I want to watch something so it just wasn't in the database in my mind for interest.
Ozymandias may be the best episode of any TV show ever... 10.0 / 10 on IMDB with 222k ratings My favorite three episode stretch is S2 E7-E9, Negro y Azul, Better Call Saul, 4 Days Out
Shoresy is Ted Lasso meets Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Canadian filth. Semi-pro hockey. It’s amazing.
I had a neighbor, (a retired SCC sheriff) who was a huge fan of the show, and begged me to watch it. She even brought over several seasons of shows on CD, and they sat there on a shelf, unwatched. I think the subject matter turned me off, meth, criminals, etc. even though I had never watched a minute of it. It wasn't until I could watch it on Direct TV that I started into it and was immediately hooked and remember several long binge sessions catching up through the seasons. Definitely one of my favorite shows ever.
I get that The West Wing wasn't entirely consistent for its whole run, but at its peak it was amazing. Should be mentioned as one of the best shows ever.
Thinking about the series that I grew up on, series that encouraged people to be good parents or good doctors -- Father Knows Best and Marcus Welby and Ozzie and Harriet.. But today series like Breaking Bad and Weeds (I've seen neither), encourage millenials and younger to embrace ordinary people becoming ruthless drug dealers.
Yep, too much glorifying of criminality and violence. Add Soprano's to that list, though I really like it.
If you think Breaking Bad encourages anyone to become a ruthless drug dealer... obviously you have never seen it Sopranos encourages people to become bigoted mob bosses, Mad Men encourages people to become alcoholic adulterers who are empty inside, Succession encourages people to become scheming members of the Murdoch family...