Television

[sally]

he's a sir bald baldrick now...partly for his time team work

[niminy-piminy]

i heard there is a QAnon episode of South Park, so i am watching it.
so far, some scenes (with vaccinated elderly) reminded me of "Trash Humpers".
anyway, have to pay more attention to coded language and symbols now!
South ParQ Vaccination Special, Season 24 E 2
https://www.southparkstudios.com/episod ... on-24-ep-2

[DT.]

Nathan for You (S02E08)

[pabs]

I'm watching the very first episode of Breaking Bad. *

I think I'm really gonna like this.

(*Better late than never.)

[pabs]

My film watching has suffered from the volume of tv episodes I've been watching instead.

After almost losing my attention, the UK tv series I MAY DESTROY YOU (2020) grabbed me at the fourth episode and I really got into it from there. Currently on episode 7 and so glad I got over that hump. Literally. There was too much humping for me in some of those early chapters and I got bored.

It's about a sassy young writer and her friends in London muddling through modern life as well as dealing with sexual abuse and rape. It's brilliantly written.

Review: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radi ... 0s2-tqC6e8

[Searchlike]

Personally, I've been a lot more eager to watch television ever since I began to consider TV and movies basically the same thing, but I'm all for the expanded field of film and don't believe there are any major reasons to consider them two wholly different mediums.

On that note, what if I told you that you could binge-watch a TV show and still have a productive day? What if the average film was 5 minutes long? Which directors would thrive under this format? What would a comic strip version of Hong Sang-soo look like? Can you only take Mike Leigh in small doses?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-vTXZQpK2c

A shame the BBC only allowed Leigh to make 5 of these, the concept sounds a lot more interesting than what remains of it.

"I thought it was a cracking idea, and I would have done forty of them or fifty – so you’d see them all the time, and sometimes you might see a character you never saw again, sometimes you might see somebody popping up for a moment and then be a main character in another one, or there’d be a couple of ones that would run on to a narrative. It would be a whole microcosm of the world. There was debate about whether they should be shown at the same time or they should be dotted around the channel, like currants in the pudding, as Tony Garnett, the producer, called it."

[pabs]

Pity Leigh's idea didn't get the green light.

[Roscoe]

MARE OF EASTTOWN -- the season opener has a particularly bad case of FirstEpisoditis, that thing where they get very busy setting up Everything That Is To Follow, where dialogue is all too clearly exposition, and it isn't long before I start checking my watch to see how much longer the show is. I found it all very airless and phony, staged and art-directed and acted. I didn't believe a frame of it.

[pabs]

Heimat (Reitz, 1984)

Loved almost every hour of this 15-hour story of three generations from three families and their journey through time in a small German village on the Rhine. Reitz is such a sensitive writer/director, I was moved to tears a few times as characters died (mostly gently, of old age), fell in love, or experienced heartbreak and disappointment. All this was told over a period of 63 years from 1919 to 1982. Though partially insulated from the big bad world by their location in a quiet rural region, the effects of two World Wars, Hitler's regime, and the country's reconstruction all obviously manage to seep into and affect the fabric of their lives.

Reitz felt compelled to make Heimat after he saw the American NBC television mini-series Holocaust (1978), which angered him because of its superficial and clichéd portrait of Germany and Germans. I recently saw a trailer for Holocaust and it actually does look bad - eye-rollingly so. I immediately saw everything that would have irritated and sickened him. Compared to Heimat, Holocaust looks to be very trite and silly indeed, completely and utterly soulless, a Germany as conceived by Walt Disney.

10/10 - and it's a very rare thing for me to give full marks to any film.

[Silga]

Just finished watching Physical. Rose Byrne is wonderful in the lead role. 80s aesthetics are on point, I think. Some great supporting performances as well, especially from Della Saba, Dierdre Friel and Lou Taylor Pucci. It's been renewed for Season 2. Looking forward to what's next in store for Sheila.

[deepbluefunk]

I'm watching Masaaki Yuasa's 'Ping Pong the animation' which is pretty awesome.
He wrote this series and it's got such a deft way of letting different character's arcs unfold at separate times. The animation is cracking good too. I feel like I'm about to binge all his stuff.

[pabs]

A few days ago I watched episode 1 of the second lot of "Heimat" films called Die zweite Heimat (literally "The Second Heimat", or "The Second Home/homeland").
These episodes will mostly focus on the young Hermann Simon, who we got to know in the first "Heimat" covering 63 years from 1919 to 1982.

This guy leaves his mother and family in the small village on the Rhine we got to know so well in that first instalment of films. We're taken back now to 1960, when Hermann arrives in Munich with his suitcase. Here he takes, and then manages to pass (but only just - and then only because he's tricky!), an exam to gain admission to the city's illustrious conservatorium of music.

So I'm just one episode into this "Heimat 2", as it's usually referred to in English, and I'm already in heaven. This is once again a beautiful story really well-told, so interesting, so engaging, with an excellent cast, superb acting, and such sensitive, thoughtful writing/direction. I cannot recommend it too highly.

EVERYONE SHOULD SEE THESE HEIMAT FILMS!

[mesnalty]

Heimat 2 is my favorite of the series - just stunning.

[pabs]

Heimat 2 is my favorite of the series - just stunning.

Amazing, given the very high bar set by Heimat 1. I'm going to try to watch "H2" slowly by rationing my viewings to no more than three per week. The first episode of Heimat 2 is still percolating through my mind right now. I'm going to savour each one for a couple of days before watching the next.

[Roscoe]

DIANA: THE MUSICAL -- on Netflix, an atrocity that gives every indication of being the latest product of Bialystock and Bloom.

[pabs]

I started watching this and I'm liking it.

[rischka]

Having finished the sopranos I'm on to succession and it's not that different!

edit: caught up waiting for the new episode tonight

[rischka]

https://youtu.be/GZ-3YwVQV0M

ukraine president's former career as a tv comedy star. w/eng subs. it's pretty good

[sally]

it's very surreal, in a way he's still acting, or it's the reverse of acting, taking the noble postures of dramatic heroism and applying them to real life.....same way all those kids on snake island sounded like they were playing call of duty or something, except now they're all actually dead.

thinking in future that all our political class should be recruited from the stage.....

[sally]

omg he played napoleon

[nrh]

i generally have very low tolerance for modern streaming series but i really liked pushkar-gayatri's suzhal: the vortex (on prime), a very angry slow burn small town mystery starring periyerum perumal fame kathir as a cop in over his head (plus aiwsharya rajesh, parthiban, and a ton of other character actors i don't recognize but who are very good). very deliberate in setting up and overturning stereotype expectations, the cops being one step behind is part of the overall structure (no surprise if you've seen vikram vedha), the anger at the end is very clear and cathartic.

probably the best indian streaming series i've seen since paatal lok, but honestly i've not seen all that many.

[rischka]

i also have a low tolerance for streaming series but i just found out about 'for all mankind' - an alternate timeline where USSR beat US to the moon.

as a big fan of 'the right stuff' and someone who grew up in navy culture - this is fabulous. i'm 2 epsisodes in

i love scifi and there are so many now! i'm glad a stray comment on twitter led me to this one

[rischka]

episodes

anyways it's a trip

[rischka]

On to better call Saul

[greennui]

Not sure if it's cuz I was hungover beyond belief but I loved the first episodes of the new Lord of Rings series. Very soothing.

[rischka]

i'm being stubborn about this. they've ruined enough of my childhood memories! but if i see enough raves i might try it

[pabs]

I finished season 1 of Breaking Bad after abandoning it midstream for about six months. I'm so glad I got back to it. It was an article about Anthony Hopkins which reminded me. Hopkins had recently binge-watched all of BB and after that felt compelled to write a letter to Bryan Cranston to tell him how awed and amazed he was at Cranston's performance.

[rischka]

i might watch the tolkien since it's upsetting racists so much.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/156 ... 2aSxw7MXSQ

[rischka]

also i loved bb but bcs is better

[Lencho of the Apes]

Far from Tolkien, even far from fantasy as we know it, but I really enjoyed the 4 episode adaptation of Gormenghast that BBC did in 2000. NRH, who has read the books, didn't like it as well.