What Have You Watched Recently?

[archer]

I watched the first five episodes of the Station Eleven miniseries.

 

The first episode was great. After that...

 

I probably would have stopped watching if it had been an ongoing series. But with it being a miniseries, I feel like I can go ahead and finish it out (as opposed to dedicating the next few years of my life watching a regular series that's stopped being engaging).

 

The main flaw to me is the time jump forward to deal with several things a few years later. My favorite part of the series is the young actress. Taking screen time from her to deal with less interesting things.... 😕 

[Joe Walsh]

3 hours ago, archer said:

I probably would have stopped watching if it had been an ongoing series. But with it being a miniseries, I feel like I can go ahead and finish it out (as opposed to dedicating the next few years of my life watching a regular series that's stopped being engaging).

 

That's exactly what we've been saying (4 episodes in)!

[Spence]

7 hours ago, archer said:

Station Eleven

?

Is it a stream?

[Scott Ruggels]

1 hour ago, Spence said:

?

Is it a stream?

It's on HBO Max.

[Spence]

4 hours ago, Scott Ruggels said:

It's on HBO Max.

 

oh,

 

I guess I'll never see it.  Tried a HBO Max sub last year.  The cost versus the pathetic content was made me end it after a month. 

Maybe I'll see it when it streams somewhere.

[Scott Ruggels]

42 minutes ago, Spence said:

 

oh,

 

I guess I'll never see it.  Tried a HBO Max sub last year.  The cost versus the pathetic content was made me end it after a month. 

Maybe I'll see it when it streams somewhere.

Poking around on my Mom's HBO Max account, it's not that it is bereft of content, it's that the menus suck. I mean really suck, but there are a lot of classic movies on it, as well as a large amount of animated content (I am a sucker for cartoons). The selection is admittedly not as good as Amazon Prime, but it's a bit more varied that Netflix. 

[Starlord]

Yeah, I think HBO Max has an excellent amount of content.  Particularly if you count their access to TCM.

[archer]

I'm watching Servant of the People.

 

It's the sitcom which gave Ukrainian President Zelenskyy his start as an actor.

 

He plays the part of a history teacher who is unexpectedly elected President of Ukraine.

 

It's free on YouTube with subtitles at the moment but I don't know how much longer that will last. Netflix just announced that they were going to be showing it (I assume dubbed but maybe not).

 

I'm only a few episodes in right now but I can see why it was popular. 

 

 

After this series, I plan to watch him on Dancing with the Stars (Ukrainian edition). I saw a clip of him doing a samba and he looked to be of comparable talent to the actors who go on the US version of the show.

[mattingly]

On 2/14/2022 at 6:36 AM, mattingly said:

Jessica Jones is my favorite out of all of them. Especially Season 1.

 

And now it's on Disney Plus!

 

https://www.disneyplus.com/series/jessica-jones

 

 

[Joe Walsh]

Spider-Man: No Way Home. Possibly the best Spider-Man movie so far...if you've seen them all, plus the rest of the MCU stuff, anyway. Good story, good action, and a good balance between them.

[Pariah]

I just finished watching the 4th season of Star Trek: Discovery. Overall, I think this series has been getting better every season. There were two things about the fourth season that I really, really liked:

 

(Spoilered for those who haven't seen the last three episodes yet.)

Spoiler

First, there has been a lot of discussion this series about the characters and their mental health. Anxiety, depression, survivor guilt, identity, belonging, and the struggle to find a sense of purpose have all played major roles this season. I think it was a conscious decision on the part of the showrunners to try to relate to the struggles real people have been having in the real world over the last couple of years. As a storytelling element, I thought it worked really well.

 

Second, the last three episodes focused sharply on first contact with Species 10-C. I think this is the best representation of a first contact event in the history of the franchise. The established right at the outset that the Universal Translator wouldn't help. It turns out that these aliens are more than just actors with rubber prostheses on their foreheads. They are truly alien in form and communicate using pheromones and patterns of light. The sequences of trying to establish communication reminded me a lot of Carl Sagan's Contact. I think this is perhaps the hardest science fiction we've ever seen in Star Trek. 

 

And, of course, it was nice to see Tilly again. Given the way things ended, though, I wonder how big a part of season 5 Book is going to be.

[Joe Walsh]

Drive My Car (HBO Max): It's a Japanese film about a talented and respected stage actor and director whose wife dies unexpectedly. A couple of years afterward, he gets an offer to direct Chekhov's Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima. As is his habit, he requests a hotel room about an hour away from the theater, so he can go over the lines using a tape recorded by his wife years before. But the theater has a strict policy that all visiting artists must use a driver. So the movie is part road trip, but is mostly about him working through the loss of his wife. It's a 3-hour drama that's done just about perfectly. Every one of the main and secondary characters is done so well, and the story kept me wanting to see more, despite its long running time. Highly recommended.

We watched episodes 5 and 6 of Deadwood, Station Eleven, and The Righteous Gemstones (all on HBO Max) this weekend. Deadwood continues to get better, Station Eleven continues to get worse, and The Righteous Gemstones continues to be well worth watching.

[death tribble]

The Passage

Antony Quinn's Basque guide is asked to get James Mason's scientist out of France and into Spain but then finds out he has to get the entire family (wife, son and daughter) as well. They are chased by Malcolm McDowell's comic Nazi SS captain. Michel Lonsdale and Christopher Lee are also in the cast. It is not bad but there are better war films.

 

Squirm

Electrify the earth after a storm and what do you get ? Worms that eat human flesh. They turn on a community cut off by the storm and come out at night. A guy is visiting his girlfriend in said community and is suspected of playing practical jokes by the sheriff which means when he raises the alarm about the worms he is not believed. Not bad.

 

Broken Lance

Has been compared to King Lear on an American West cattle ranch. Spencer Tracy is the Lear figure with the daughters replaced by sons including Richard Widmark and Robert Wagner. After a mine on his land causes the death of some of his cattle, Tracy's men attack and destroy the mine workings. A judicial compromise means that one of the sons will go to jail and Wagner agrees much to Tracy's horror. Tracy dies while his son is in jail leading to confrontation between Wagner and Widmark. Pretty good as you have the acting talents of Tracy and Widmark.

 

Gas-s-s

A gas leak leads to everyone over 25 perishing. You then have a breakdown of society in this Roger Corman film. It is quite bizarre. You should be able to sit through it once.

 

The Vampire Lovers

Ingrid Pitt preys on all and sundry as the vampire Mircalla/Carmilla/Marcilla. She takes the form of a cat for several of her victims. Better than her other vampire film, Countess Dracula. Peter Cushing, Kate O'Mara, Douglas Wilmer and George Cole are also in the cast. One of the better Hammer vampire pictures that does not have Christopher Lee as Dracula.

 

Alita: Battle Angel

Christoph Waltz rebuilds cyborgs and finds an unusual fragment in the junkyard. He connects it to the body he had made for his daughter and the cyborg comes to life. Christened Alita she discovers the new world of the Iron City which is in the shadow of the last sky city. The film sets up the ingredients for a sequel while still making you interested in the film..

[Scott Ruggels]

Katla (Netflix) an Icelandic TV show with curiously high production values about a few families staying behind in a village slowly being buried by a volcanic eruption, and has lasted for a year. One day Duplicates of people, living or deadstart to show up in the village.  Strange and very interesting, the show builds up a very specific mood. 

[Spence]

On 3/18/2022 at 5:36 PM, Scott Ruggels said:

Poking around on my Mom's HBO Max account, it's not that it is bereft of content, it's that the menus suck. I mean really suck, but there are a lot of classic movies on it, as well as a large amount of animated content (I am a sucker for cartoons). The selection is admittedly not as good as Amazon Prime, but it's a bit more varied that Netflix. 

That could very well be. 

Unless you already know the exact title you are looking for their search was also useless and their "suggestions" got worse after every show I did watch instead of suggesting anything similar.  

From what I saw a dedicated Bollywood streaming service has more content for a person that hates musicals than HBO MAX has content for anyone. 

 

[csyphrett]

The boy and I watched another Columbo two pack with Robert Conrad killing one of his franchisees over being exposed as a fraud, and Dick Van Dyke killing his wife with a fake kidnapping and framing a convict for the crime. Pete Fischer is the main writer/story editor for this season, I guess taking over for Jackson Gillis, head writer for Perry Mason.

CES   

[Pariah]

We watched Raya and the Last Dragon the other night. Good story, strong voice work, fantastic animation. The ending was predictable (it's a Disney movie, duh), but how they got to the ending was pretty surprising. I recommend it.

 

(And Raya's dragon is better than Mulan's dragon.)

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

20 minutes ago, Pariah said:

(And Raya's dragon is better than Mulan's dragon.)

 

[Pariah]

1 hour ago, Logan.1179 said:

 

 

[Starlord]

5 hours ago, Logan.1179 said:

 

 

The Random Mooing thread is over there....

[Scott Ruggels]

18 hours ago, Spence said:

That could very well be. 

Unless you already know the exact title you are looking for their search was also useless and their "suggestions" got worse after every show I did watch instead of suggesting anything similar.  

From what I saw a dedicated Bollywood streaming service has more content for a person that hates musicals than HBO MAX has content for anyone. 

 

  Part of that is that yes, you do need the exact titles, yes.  The other is that you have to go down to the bottom, and search in the submenus for the "Channels" that Max offers. IT really is annoying, but there really is a lot of material if you look under every nook and cranny of that terrible interface.  That being said, I kind of prefer Amazon Prime, and I am still poking at Netflix on occasion, as long as I avoid Netflix Originals, and look at other offerings.

[Spence]

 

  Part of that is that yes, you do need the exact titles, yes.  The other is that you have to go down to the bottom, and search in the submenus for the "Channels" that Max offers. IT really is annoying, but there really is a lot of material if you look under every nook and cranny of that terrible interface.  That being said, I kind of prefer Amazon Prime, and I am still poking at Netflix on occasion, as long as I avoid Netflix Originals, and look at other offerings.

 

It has been a while and I don't remember specifics, but anything that the site would "recommend" was always filling up the screen with garbage that I would consider grounds for frenzied destruction just to maintain sanity.  Of course there was no way to indicate you considered their firehose of sewage to be sewage.  So after constant bombardment and no visible way to browse through anything actually interesting I left. 

 

I would consider trying again if HBO Max agrees to pay me $300 dollars a month for mental anguish while subscribed.

 

Netflix does have some good and some bad originals, overall they have far better everything than the so called networks.  Of course I mostly watch K-Drama there but there have been some good shows.  Vikings Valhalla was not to bad.  Most of the really bad garbage is garbage for the same reason and Disney's, Paramount+, network shows and a lot of movies have been cratering.  Announce a neat new movie/show based on a popular and well loved property.  The ignore the property and fill steaming pile with personal whim of the moment and then call everyone an ist of one type or another.   Cowboy Bebop initial looked promising and might have been OK if they had actually used the Cowboy Bebop story.    I looked through the original and for the life of me I could find an episode dedicated to engine room floor sex. 

 

They have the technical ability to make good adaptations, but just like the upcoming steaming piles soon to release from Amazon and Paramount+, the only part of the shows that will tie to the source materials are the titles. 

 

 

 

[Scott Ruggels]

1 hour ago, Spence said:

 

It has been a while and I don't remember specifics, but anything that the site would "recommend" was always filling up the screen with garbage that I would consider grounds for frenzied destruction just to maintain sanity.  Of course there was no way to indicate you considered their firehose of sewage to be sewage.  So after constant bombardment and no visible way to browse through anything actually interesting I left. 

 

I would consider trying again if HBO Max agrees to pay me $300 dollars a month for mental anguish while subscribed.

 

 

I never look at the recommends, The recommends even on YouTube are getting worse and worse, so Instead I look at my Subscribed list to see what's new from people I actually want to hear from in a timely fashion. For HBO, it's a case of just digging by subject.  Oddly though, the Amazon Recommendations are actually not terrible, which was a surprise.

[Spence]

57 minutes ago, Scott Ruggels said:

Oddly though, the Amazon Recommendations are actually not terrible, which was a surprise.

 

True, but I am not surprised.  Amazon wants to sell you stuff so they go to great pains to make sure all of their platforms recommendations actually target things you like.  It is not about the message, it is about the dollar.  That is why I am surprised their Prime Video created series are abandoning built in fan bases to agenda signal.   I can just hear the money swirling down the drain.

[Matt the Bruins]

Maybe there are enough women, people of color, and LGBT subscribers that including programming geared toward them is a net gain over the loss of angry white men who cancel when they see anyone not exactly like them?