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Notes -
So, what is everyone watching (films, shows, even YouTube if you think it counts)?
I've seen two movies recently:
The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017): This is the second Lanthimos film I've seen after Bugonia and Dogtooth, the former of which I loved and the latter of which was meh. KSD felt like it was awkwardly edgy and vague, but I very well may have missed the point. The actors did an excellent job of making me feel uncomfortable throughout. 4.2/10 enjoyment, give me those hours of my life back.
Train Dreams (2025): I've always enjoyed movies about everyday, simple lives (I don't have any others off the top of my head, but I know they exist). This one resonated with me because of a forest in my life, one that I half-seriously say I grew up in through mountain biking, trail running, airsoft battles, exploring, fort-building, and general elementary and teenage debauchery. 8.1/10 enjoyment, give me those years of my life back. I was a bit surprised everyone else's ratings were so high, though.
For plain 'turn your brain off and enjoy the nonsense', Chinese TV adaptation of a web novel. Series is called Whispers of Fate and is on Youtube and has the usual tropes of gorgeous scenery and sets, pretty boy martial artists, some light romance (which works for one pairing but not so much for another) and lots of implausible but highly entertaining CGI feats of mixed wuxia/xianxia, and of course the ever-popular Tragic Backstory of Doomed Brotherhood Ending in Betrayal and Death.
It's not the best example I've seen, and the story deviates quite a lot from the original web novel (still unfinished), some of the CGI isn't that well-done (guys, if a very important part of the plot is 'magical musical cultivation' then at least try and make it look like the combatants are playing their instruments?), the plot drags a little (not the show's fault, the book plot gets very convoluted too) and the acting is variable, to put it most kindly, but on the whole it's fun. The comic relief characters are good, and sometimes it breaks my heart because the main protagonist/antagonist pairing of the Tragic Etc. were all so happy in their Little Sect of Found Family before it all went to heck and tarnation (equally infuriating because antagonist is so easily manipulated into his Roaring Rampage of Revenge by others), but I have to say my favourite character so far is the wily sect leader who is on the good (more or less) guy side and is a consummate politician and schemer under a façade of benign avuncular harmlessness. Most capable person so far plus he's intentionally funny.
I'm also very impressed by how the protagonist can do the requisite Spitting Up Blood without ever spilling a drop on his white clothing!
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Decided my kids are old enough for Lord of the Rings, so we got started with that. We have the Extended version, which I've never watched before, and I found myself noticing that several scenes were actually made worse by the extra stuff added in. We're only one movie in so far, so I think we'll watch the theatrical version of the second one.
That's a very wild take. The extended editions of LOTR are by far the better versions, as there is a lot of the book which only exists in those extra scenes.
The book gets defiled even more in the extra scenes I've seen. The worst one that I've seen is the one with the Mouth of Sauron; instead of in the book, where the Mouth of Sauron has its intended effects on common folk like hobbits or random soldiers, the movie has the entire cast crestfallen and eating all of the Mouth of Sauron's propaganda full force. In the book, Gandalf calls his bluff and asks him to produce the hobbits, and when he snarls in response, dismisses him. In the movie, Aragorn gets so angry that he rides his horse up and then when he's past the line of sight of the Mouth of Sauron, heaves his great sword and decapitates him in a sneak attack full of rage. That last part is so incredibly far off from the way the book portrayed Aragorn that it's a total insult. If @HereAndGone2 is the same person as FarNearEverywhere, then she might have more to say...
Jackson's Aragorn has always been significantly different from his book counterpart though. Probably somewhat of a necessity if you don't want to get into details of his and Gondor's history (though they do bring in the Numenorean stuff in the Extended editions)
It actually affects what you think the themes of LOTR are. A lot of people take the One Ring to represent power as such which I think can be directly traced to the idea that Aragorn, the good king, doesn't want to be king unless it's pressed upon him by the most extreme circumstances. e end...
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Ah, how well you know me.
I've complained about Jackson's changes, there are some I accept because you're making a movie and that's a different medium, some I don't because yeah as you say, totally misunderstands the characters.
But by God, when they're compared to "Galadriel forgot she was a married woman and started making googly-eyes at Sauron in between doing her damnedest to be a war criminal and general pain in the backside to Man and Elf", I didn't know how good I had it.
I think I'm most pained on Celebrimbor's part. "Gosh, these durn metals just won't do what they're told and form the vital rings that will save our people from immediate death!" "Yeah, about that: have you ever heard of the amazing new technique called 'alloys'? It's a little thing we scruffy Mortals came up with recently".
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Loved Train Dreams.
Just watched it with the fiancé a few days ago. I was playing Civ VI the first 15 minutes but the movie hooked me and we both loved it.
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I watched Lanthimos's Poor Things in the cinema. I kind of liked it, but watching Emma Stone fuck assorted men for forty-five minutes isn't exactly my idea of a good time. I don't really understand the hype around Barry Keoghan (he was dreadful in The Banshees of Inisherin, the only thing I've seen him in), though I'd heard he was good in KSD.
Last night I watched Martha Marcy May Marlene with the girlfriend, which I saw exactly once in the cinema ~13 years ago. It's remarkable what a big impression it made on me: there were specific shots and line-readings in it that I remembered so clearly, as if I'd only seen the film the day before. Along with Kill List, probably the best film about a cult I've ever seen,* highly recommended. Keen to see director Sean Durkin's The Iron Claw; his second film The Nest was also excellent.
The night before we watched Casino, which she'd seen before and I hadn't. Comparisons to Goodfellas are unavoidable (the two films' style, grammar and use of licensed songs are nigh-identical, and Joe Pesci might as well be playing the same character), but in some ways it's the superior film. When Henry and Karen got into ferocious arguments in Goodfellas, there was always this blackly comic undercurrent to it, a sense that you shouldn't take it too seriously. By contrast, I found it genuinely upsetting watching Sam and Ginger scream at each other in Casino, even though Ginger is arguably a more despicable character than Karen. This is primarily down to Sharon Stone's performance, which is committed and forceful: she's entirely believable as a booze- and coke-addled BPD nutcase, and in a way that somehow manages to come off as sympathetic rather than caricatured. Afterwards, I remarked that being exceptionally attractive as an actress can be something of a double-edged sword: on the one hand it does make it easier to secure roles, but it's easy to wind up pigeon-holed as just a pretty face, and in both of the previous Stone films I've seen (Total Recall and Basic Instinct; love the former, the latter is meh) she was essentially playing a one-dimensional femme fatale. But in Casino, she really demonstrated her acting chops.
*Yes, I'm including the original The Wicker Man.
Agree that Casino is the better of the two, although both are great. The scene with the county commissioner trying to get his nephew re-hired is a favorite. Scorcese is so good that he gets the viewer (just look at YT comments on the scene) to think that DeNiro's character is the righteous one!
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1: The Amazing Digital Circus (ongoing). I watched it all from episode 1-7 after hearing a lot about it, expecting to find nothing but mediocrity at best and brainrot at worst. But... I'm ashamed to say I like it. It's a weird mix between a Pixar movie and I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.
There are some parts that feel unnecessarily fan-servicey (e.g. putting a character in a maid outfit temporarily), and the characters have one too many Ted Lasso-esque heart-to-hearts, but there are good character moments and in general it toes the line between absurd zoomer humour and existential dread quite well. Despite the fact that it's clearly not meant to be overly highbrow (and it isn't), there's also some surprising references hidden in all of the bullshit, such as a brief reference to Searle's Chinese Room which just gets played off as a gag. Overall, it's a pretty decent and fun watch, I see why it achieved internet fame. 7.5/10 enjoyment.
2: Pluribus (2025). Against my better judgement, I watched the season all the way through, and it was somehow more disappointing than the first 3 episodes made it out to be. Oh, this rant is going to be long and angry.
Firstly, the pacing and themes: The series is hilariously slow-paced and spends a large amount of its runtime on expository scenes that primarily serve to illustrate the same handful of themes over and over again, you can see all of the plot developments from a mile away, and it covers all the bog standard fare for a sci-fi hive mind show (asking questions about the value of individualism vs collectivism, about if it's worth it if the cost of peace is one's selfhood and the loss of these valuable human things that arise from our attempts to reach out to each other, about if a person is ever really "independent", etc). I can't see it as treading much new ground in that regard, aside from the fact that it does so in a far more ponderous and soap-operatic manner than other science fiction. Perhaps this is uncharitable, but I also can't help but think that the people who actually think that the show adventurously breaks new ground are the pseudo-literary kind, the kind who would stay away from anything that they consider as pulp, and who genuinely believe that this concept is a new vehicle through which to tackle these philosophical themes because they would never be seen dead consuming genre fiction.
Secondly, the characterisation: Considering its fans tout it as a character study, there's noticeably little character development. Carol starts the season as a committed misanthrope seething with hatred and fear for the hive and what it represents, and... she ends the season as a committed misanthrope seething with hatred and fear for the hive and what it represents, after a brief period of wilfully deluding herself into believing that Zosia loves her. Pretty much the only dynamic that ends up changing is the newfound presence of Manousos at the end of the season. And most of Carol's (circular) character arc, far from redeeming her, seems to paint her as a worse character than you initially thought she was; initially it's possible to think of her as steadfastly principled in spite of her abrasive, aggressive nature, but the second she finds out that the hive can't convert her without her consent she immediately embraces pure hedonism, and goes so far as to have sex with a member of the hive (something she hypocritically criticises Koumba for doing earlier on in the show). The second she finds out again she can be converted by means of her frozen eggs, a plot point that makes zero sense for various reasons (including the fact that induced pluripotent stem cells can be made from virtually any bodily cell and germ cells are actually some of the worst candidates for stem cell creation due to the fact they only contain half the genome), she reverts to her original stance on the hive. It reveals that her opposition to the hive was not out of any kind of principle or selflessness, but out of her own self-interest. By the end of the season, I genuinely could not think of a single thing to like about her - she started out as a miserable Karen who you might have been able to argue had principles, and that argument gets eroded so heavily throughout the course of the season such that there isn't anything to like by the time the season is done. And she's so stuck in a holding pattern that the season leaves no room for her character growth.
Thirdly and finally, the visuals. In spite of an insane per episode budget of $15 million, many of the shots just look bad. There are multiple scenes that are clearly and obviously greenscreened: the rooftop scene in Episode 5 (which is so ugly it looks like a certain shot from The Room), as well as Kusimayu's conversion scene, Manousos and Carol's fight scene, and the scene with Carol and Zosia in "Thailand" in Episode 9 just look awful. And apparently the rooftop scene was by far the most costly scene in the show! Some other scenes were shot on location and look fine, but some scenes require such terrible VFX, are so expensive and yet are so irrelevant to the plot that it boggles my mind why they even attempted such a shot in the first place. Frankly, it's so obsessed with its cool visual concepts that it almost feels like the point of the story: Karolina Wydra flying a plane, the hive emptying out an entire supermarket and coordinating a large cast of extras to "fill it out" again, Carol's rooftop scene, etc; the show often feels like it's visuals-first and plot-second. There is so much pointless VFX and so much shooting across multiple continents with many extras, and that's a stark difference compared with Breaking Bad, which had little VFX, a small budget, minimal sets, etc, and managed a 10-13 month turnover between seasons. Meanwhile Pluribus is going to take a long time apparently despite being greenlit for a second season from the get-go. What does any of this actually ever get you?
In other words, I'm disappointed. I liked Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul and had high hopes for this, but this isn't it. 5/10 enjoyment, basically the show equivalent of drinking water.
I found there to be an annoying number of unasked questions and unargued arguments. Given that the hivemind can't even pick fruit (never mind that the tree WANTS you to eat the apples and crap out the seeds, this still counts as harm), the virus winds up being a pesticide that kills off an entire species, but also causes the target to tidy up after itself while it dies off.
Oh, jesus. Speaking of unasked questions, don’t even get me started about the very concept of the hive. We first see it being cultivated in rats, who seem to exhibit the same kind of behaviours that humans do once infected (convulsing, a subsequent desire to spread itself) and then it jumps to patient zero. This opens up a whole can of worms that somehow never gets explored in spite of its implications.
Does this mean there are rats in the hivemind now? Does the hive know everything the rats know as well and partially see the world through their perspective? Since there are estimated to be as many rats as humans in the world doesn’t that mean the hive mind’s perspective is half rat? Or do different species have their own hives? Why aren’t the coyotes and dogs featured in the show ever affected if the virus can effortlessly jump species? Surely at least close relatives such as chimpanzees and bonobos could be affected, etc.
The show has a million things like this that it doesn’t even seem the writers considered, and it makes it feel very sloppy. Also, is there a fuck pile featuring the most genetically fit individuals so the hive can continue to live on? I want to know these things way more than I want to see Carol crashing out for the three millionth time.
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I enjoyed it more than you (though it seems unlikely to ascend to previous Vince Gilligan heights, and the lag time between seasons is a bit of a killer).
It doesn't break new philosophical ground but it really landed 'overly efficient logistics = the death of all that is human' in an emotional way, for instance in that opening scene to the finale with the singing tribespeople, who fall tragically silent. I haven't seen that before. I also found the choreography of people moving as one throughout really cool to watch. And I think it's really funny in places.
Sure, Carol is very flawed, but also, her wife suddenly died, and then humanity was replaced before her eyes, and it seems like the whole construction of the show requires her to be antisocial in counterpoint to the extremely socially motivated Others ...
7.5/10
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Maschi veri: Italian remake of Machos Alfa! General criticism of modern dating and male/female relationships. Absolutely hilarious.
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Man, he really likes Colin Farrell and Emma Stone!
So much so even The Onion cracks jokes about it.
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I politely but passionately hold the opposite view of Train Dreams. I can’t say anything positive about it, except that some of the shots in the beginning were gorgeous. It presents an anachronistic view of the past and past attitudes, and it doesn’t say anything important or beautiful or useful about suffering. It doesn’t even present a particularly captivating portrayal of maximal suffering, if this were its intended object, and it doesn’t show its catharsis in any worthwhile way. In effect, it does nothing, but in fact no, it does worse than that. Because the director took the time to ensure that as you experience vicarious suffering for no reason whatsoever, you also become misinformed about the past: the women don’t believe in marriage ceremonies and everyone is an atheist (except the guy who is killed right after reciting the Bible, for being racist of course, and the kind fellow who finds trees divine). But the inaccuracies extend further, and more noticeably. Our protagonist in actual history was involved in labor strikes that won him an 8hr workday with Sundays off; he formed relief for laid off and injured workers; he formed ad-hoc civic and biblical organizations in his free time. That’s what 1890 to 1920 was actually like: hopeful men forming civic organizations. You had 50k woodworkers striking in Washington and Idaho during WW1 when the movie took place. These men weren’t hopeless, weepy, wimpy, and ignorant. And they would not have been traumatized seeing Chinese laborers deported (lmfao), because those were his wage competitors. White laborers were the very party who lobbied for mass deportations and got them, to secure their quality of life, which worked.
As art, unbelievably horrible; as propaganda, extremely skilled.
Admittedly, I was too entranced with the cinematography and thinking back on my forest to notice (or even think about) how the historical accuracy.
My take on the suffering piece is that sometimes suffering just happens for no good reason and it never gets better. Grainier losing his wife and daughter in the fire was something he never found reprieve from, except maybe in the dogs that he adopted. He never found love again. He never had long-term friends, just the seasonal workers he worked with during his time on shift.
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