ARCHIVED FORUM -- March 2012 to February 2022READ ONLY FORUM
This is the second Archived Forum which was active between 1st March 2012 and 23rd February 2022
I did find the birth of the Queen's child to be, well, interesting! Oops!
I just started watching another excellent made for Netflix show, "Travelers." It's a scifi show, people come back from the future, to attempt to stop some unspecified disaster(s). There are apparently few people left alive in the future, about a hundred years hence. They travel back by transferring their minds/consciousnesses to a human here who is about to die, they know when people die and pick who to transfer to but it's not always perfect. One woman transferred into what they thought was a librarian, but that was a fake social media creation by the woman's social worker, she really was just a night cleaning crew type, very mentally challenged, so the change is noticeable to everyone. Also, she knows she'll eventually die as the host mind is incapable of supporting the increased intelligence long term. One man transfers into a heroin addict who they thought died on his first injection, they didn't realize he was a long term addict, which presents problems for the traveler.
So far very well written and acted. Netflix does a surprisingly good job on their shows, they put money and talent into them.
Jeff
I'm afraid I'm recovering from the BeoVirus.
OK, I finally got around to watching Amazon's "The Man In The High Castle" base on a book by PKDick, my favorite author (we'll see if the nanny filter will allow his name through). I'm only 3 episodes into it, and it picks up slowly, but it's amazing. Very well done, good acting, amazing rendition of the alternate reality of 1953 if the Nazi's and Japan had won the war. Grim and depressing, very much the same feel as the movie "1984" managed to portray, a grim Fascist reality of an occupied US. Oddly this is one work of PKD that I've never read, and now I'm sure I'm going to read it but trying to decide if I should wait until I finish watching the series or start now.
I have to say, looking at the things that Amazon and Netflix have themselves made, outside the usual network TV or even prime TV channels (HBO, etc.) I am consistently impressed. Production values are always very high, and so far I've only found one I didn't like ("Hemlock Grove" was inane). We are definitely seeing a change in the way content is originated and distributed.
BeoNut since '75
Absolutely love the reboot the of Battlestar Galactica! The first episode after the pilot/miniseries, "33" is one of the best things I've ever seen.
Have been getting into "Bate's Motel" lately, a modernized prequel to "Psycho" about Norman Bates and his mother when they first opened the motel and Norman is 17. Unsettling to say the least, but very well done and fascinating.
Jeff: OK, I finally got around to watching Amazon's "The Man In The High Castle" base on a book by PKDick, my favorite author (we'll see if the nanny filter will allow his name through). I'm only 3 episodes into it, and it picks up slowly, but it's amazing. Very well done, good acting, amazing rendition of the alternate reality of 1953 if the Nazi's and Japan had won the war. Grim and depressing, very much the same feel as the movie "1984" managed to portray, a grim Fascist reality of an occupied US. Oddly this is one work of PKD that I've never read, and now I'm sure I'm going to read it but trying to decide if I should wait until I finish watching the series or start now. I have to say, looking at the things that Amazon and Netflix have themselves made, outside the usual network TV or even prime TV channels (HBO, etc.) I am consistently impressed. Production values are always very high, and so far I've only found one I didn't like ("Hemlock Grove" was inane). We are definitely seeing a change in the way content is originated and distributed.
A bloke at work was having a chat to me the other day about this - it's next on my list! But I'm not on Amazon so I don't know how I can get to it.
What I totally binged watched was Netflixes "The OA" - I was totally In love with it. It is about a girl who was adopted from a Russian lady by a couple who were unable to have children. They went to the Russian lady's house to adopt (and pay) for a little boy however they met by accident a little girl upstairs who was blind. They thought she was gifted and was ultimately adopted. During her childhood she was regularly medicated for an unknown condition, and as she got older she went off and disappeared and was the subject of an experiment to return to her parents, but now with sight.
Very interesting and enthralling to watch
I've watched the first episode of "The OA" and found it intriguing, but have to get back to it. I recently found the 2nd season of "Ash Vs. Evil Dead" available and bought it and am working my way through it.
I also just rewatched "Ascension" which is a Scifi miniseries about a multi-generational spaceship to Proxima Centauri launched by Kennedy. Except the ship isn't in flight, it's a huge simulator on the ground and the people inside don't know that. Fascinating concept, horribly cliff hanger of an ending with no explanations. Perhaps they thought it might turn into a series, but I HATE things that end that way. You can end a show with lots of things open to interpretation, that often is better than a pat, trite ending that doesn't make sense, but this was inexcusable!
One thing interesting about "Bate's Motel" is that the town sheriff strongly resembles, both in looks and mannerisms, Anthony Perkins of the original "Psycho." What also interesting is that the man who wrote the screenplay for "Psycho," Joseph Stefano, also wrote many of the episodes of the original "The Outer Limits" back in the '60's. Truly a show that was ahead of its time, both in stories and in camera work and other effects.
Found a couple of new things that I've enjoyed:
"Killjoys" - a science fiction romp about a quad planetary system and bounty hunters, "Reclaimation Agents" who are completely independent of citizenship or support for any faction or planetary government, completely independent, don't side with anyone. Not quite "Firefly" but an enjoyable series with a consistent and interesting "world" and structure of government, subversives, criminals, and such. I have the DVDs from Netflix.
"ARQ" - a made for Netflix movie, low budget, most of it takes place inside one house with 5 actors, but very good and innovative. The ARQ is a perpetual motion energy machine the protagonist stole from the mega-corporation that runs the world, Torus. Show starts with him and his newly returned girlfriend who had just showed up after being captured and such by Torus. Suddenly three masked men kick the door in to allegedly rob him of money. Thing is the ARQ was shorted out by a guy touching it, and now it's looping time, every 3 hours and 12 minutes it loops back to right before he woke up, right before the thugs kick the door down. As the loop through over and over some very interesting things happen, no one is exactly what they seem to be, the plots and subplots going on all slowly get exposed, and more knowledge of how long the ARQ has had them looping gradually is revealed. A very creative time travel tale.
Yesterday evening - the fourth episode/season 3 of the danish tv series Arvingerne.
As you see - it is available online too.
MM
There is a tv - and there is a BV
I started watching Travellers a few nights ago and finished last night. Compelling viewing!
Duels: I started watching Travellers a few nights ago and finished last night. Compelling viewing!
It and ARQ, I'm a sucker for time travel tales. One good one, another cheaply made but fascinating film, is "Primer." Shot for something like 10,000 dollars, it's about a couple of engineers trying to create things in their garage, ala Jobs and Wozniak with Apple, who accidentally discover a time machine. Interesting set of limitations on the machine though. If you, say, startup this box they invented today, and say a week from now get into the box, you can emerge at the time the box was turned on today, so it's limited. One of the guys gets obsessed with trying to perfect a particular incident and keeps building more and more of these machines so that at any one time there's a number of him running around at the same time.
Just got around to watching Interstellar and was taken by surprise how good the film was, from the first few scenes to the last and I did not see the end coming.
Cinematography, story-line, acting, soundtrack and special effects were evenly blended so one did not outweigh the other and was it just me but did TARS remind you of a certain iconic remote control ?
we tend to forget there is more to design than designing.
I quite enjoyed "Interstellar." A scifi movie without the usual trite conventions all stolen from Star Trek TOS. Thought provoking. The time differential between the planet near the black hole and the ship was well done.
Recently I've been watching two good scifi seriex:
The Expanse, very realistic (re physics, kinematics, etc.) show set 200 years from now, most of the solar system is explored and colonized. Focuses on the Belt (asteroid belt), Mars (an independent ex colony of Earth) and Earth and their conflicts. People born and raised in the Belt are all very tall and thin, long fragile bones, from low G. In one episode the UN was torturing a Belter to try and get information by hanging them up out of the water tank they usually were in on Earth, hung under the armpits in full 1 G. Did not look comfortable. Great space scenes, they are believable, no just suddenly swooping around like Star Wars fighters, but more accurate trajectories and maneuvers.
Dark Matter, a show about five people and an android. The people suddenly wake up out of hibernation on a damaged ship, with no memory of who they are. They assign names to themselves based on the order in which they awoke, 1, 2, etc. Later they find all of them are wanted violent, murderous mercenaries. Some of the usual scifi tropes, but very clever in many ways, lots of interesting things in the background that make the thing seem more real. Ads on vid screens in the space station, etc.
"Into The Badlands" - a fascinating combination of Chinese chop socky kung fu and Mad Maxish post apocalyptic story. Extremely well photographed, and acted, some of the fight scenes are almost ballet graceful, very well choreographed, and artistically filmed even. Filmed using the same plantations in Louisiana, US that were in "Django Unchained." Very Southern vibe about the whole countryside, old oaks and pecan trees, even a battle in a graveyard, typical Louisiana one, all decrepit above ground mausoleums. Love the character of Baron Quinn, he comes across perfectly as an old plantation head (he is the baron that grows opium poppies, there are 6 other barons specializing in different things), he's charming, charismatic, strong, brutal, and dangerous/vicious. Great show.
Beosound Stage, Beovision 8-40, Beolit 20, Beosound Explore.
Chris Townsend:Marvellous with a good red
I just finished watching all three seasons of "Hannibal." Fascinating series, ranges from the grotesque and bizarre to a stunningly complex and mentally sick psychological drama. If you have the stomach for it, it's well worth the time, intellectually fascinating and stomach churning at the same time. Beautifully filmed, darker, muted palettes of color and sets, well acted. Mads Mikkelsen plays Hannibal quite well. I mentioned in the book thread that I bought a cookbook by the food stylist called "Feeding Hannibal" that's also quite interesting.
Lately I've been watching a series, BBC I think, called "Life Below Zero" which is about several people who live up north of the Arctic Circle in Alaska and follows their trials and tribulations. One woman is the caretaker at this hunting camp that is 197 miles north of the Arctic Circle and just shy of the shore, hard to go farther north. She is alone there for about 10 months out of the year. The conditions these people live in are extreme, two of the four followed so far are singles, one woman, one man, and two families, one a couple and their sled dogs, the other a really happy and upbeat guy who is married to a native woman and has 5 kids. Out of all of them I like him the best, if they go out to hunt and don't get anything, he's always "well, we'll get something tomorrow, it's a great day!" These people they are covering, hardly buy anything. They live subsistence lives, trappin and hunting and fishing, trade for most things, sell furs and such for what money they do have. It's a fascinating show to me.
A lot of what viewing I do now is also tied up on two channels on Pluto TV, a streaming set of channels, one for Mystery Science Theater 3000, and another for Rifftrax. Both are funny as can be. Rifftrax just did "Plan 9 From Outer Space," the Ed Wood movie that is called the worst movie ever made. They had a field day with it.
Latest episode - Home Theater Geek show - 'Surrounded by Music'
Just started watching, after missing it when it was on in 1990-91, "Twin Peaks." I've wanted to see it for a while now as it has such a reputation, but never got around to it. What a bizarre, surreal, lampooning of the whole soap opera drama/supernatural genre! It's hysterically funny and overwrought, deliberately, to mimic the overwrought, stupid and Byzantinely complex plots of soaps! David Lynch doesn't disappoint.
Jeff: Just started watching, after missing it when it was on in 1990-91, "Twin Peaks." I've wanted to see it for a while now as it has such a reputation, but never got around to it. What a bizarre, surreal, lampooning of the whole soap opera drama/supernatural genre! It's hysterically funny and overwrought, deliberately, to mimic the overwrought, stupid and Byzantinely complex plots of soaps! David Lynch doesn't disappoint.
A friend of mine recommended it for me, and I watched it only last year. It's just... incredible! I have been going to, but haven't yet started watching the new third season.
After David Bowie died, a local cinema had a screening of the 'Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me' -movie (where Bowie appears, if only for a few minutes). It was totally crazy movie, I did enjoy it but if something, it only added more questions!
The third season is on Showtime or something like that isn't/wasn't it?
The jacket the sheriff wears is patterned after the carpet in the lobby of the apartment in Eraserhead from what I read, it's been a while since I've watched Eraserhead.
I just watched the episode where they are in the veterinarian's office with the lama, such a short interaction but just so perfectly timed and performed I almost split a side laughing. Great show, plus anything that has Joan Chen in it is worth watching.
Lately, since I've been wandering around Pluto TV's offerings while watching MST3K and Rifftrax, I've discovered they show old episodes of "Peter Gunn" at night. I've really been enjoying watching it, it was a show far ahead of its time in many ways. Especially with the music, all cool West Coast style jazz written by Henry Mancini. Gunn manages to get the crap beaten out of him just about every episode, but his hair is always perfect! Wonders of Vitalis I guess, or Brylcream (a little dab'l do ya).
I listened to an album of the show's music on Spotify, extremely good tunes. Great jazz.
Eurovision song contest for amateur choirs! Live from Riga.
Language, (mis)understanding, linguistics, humans and aliens told me more about real life than I exspected in advance. For me it is worth a second and third look.
Peter the Biker:Arrival Language, (mis)understanding, linguistics, humans and aliens told me more about real life than I exspected in advance. For me it is worth a second and third look. Peter the biker
Interesting, I hadn't considered "Arrival" but have added it to my Netflix BR queue.
I've started watching another old late 50s show, "Mr. Lucky" which, like "Peter Gunn" is a Blake Edwards production with music by Henry Mancini. In fact Spotify has the music from it, and boy, is it different than Mancini's Gunn music. Gunn is very good modern jazz, Lucky is very sappy old school strings and such. The theme song is this mass of syruppy strings with, no kidding, a lot of Wurlitzer organ. Sounds like Lawrence Welk on acid.
The show isn't bad. Lucky is a professional gambler who winds up owning a large yacht which he anchors outside the 3 mile limit (then) off of LA and runs as a casino. His partner is played by Ross Martin, the actor who played Artemis Gordon in "The WIld Wild West."
Only one season, it's fun but not as good as "Peter Gunn," though in searching around Amazon I've found a lot of other interesting late 50s early 60s shows to watch after I finish these.
October 6th the sequel to "Blade Runner," "Blade Runner 2049" drops. I know I will have to go see it, even though I expect to be disappointed. I guess I learned nothing from "Prometheus." Visually it looks stunning, but as to whether or not it has a decent plot, well..I'm not hopeful. Maybe it'll surprise me. And maybe monkeys will fly out of my butt.
OK, I've been hesitating to list the next two films here, as they will most certainly not be for everyone, but they are so unique and impressive overall I'm going to. If you are a lover of horror films, especially thought provoking ones that tend to go sideways in ways you've not thought of, these are quite disturbing but are also works of art and go in directions most Western films would never go.
Both are made up of three vignettes each, by different Asian horror directors, from different countries, China, Korea, Japan, Thailand, etc. The first film is entitled "Three Extremes" and the second "Three Extremes II." The first film, the vignettes are Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. The middle one is the least effective to me, but the first turns out to be just horrific but in a non traditional, no violent boogieman kind of way, but deeply disturbing. The Final Japanese one is a masterpiece of artistic surreal dreamlike imagery.
The second film the first two vignettes are decent but not as good as the first film, but the end one makes up for it all, Chinese, with a very unsettling ending and theme.
Be warned though that many, including many females, will find these hard to watch but if you like this kind of thing you will find this the kind of thing that you like.
7th season of "The Walking Dead" showed up on Netflix so I'm working through it. The show has long ago ceased to be about zombies and is really about how inhumane people are to each other. Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who is previously more noted for handsome guy romantic lead appropriate roles, plays Neagan, a complete sociopathic sadist, his favorite thing is a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire he affectionately calls "Lucille." Morgan plays the part very well, I'm imagining that the part is enjoyable for him after playing normal characters for so long, he gets to go over the top with this one. Not all in all an "enjoyable" show, but a well done one.
Went to see "It" the other night. Not a bad movie, fairly creepy, but honestly given the press I expected something a lot scarier and more unsettling, it was pretty tame. What struck me most though was the theater, my local 10 screen cineplex. Horrible video quality, no one uses film anymore so all the screens are projectors, but man, bad contrast, bad color saturation, the works. No blacks, just darkish grays, the image on my plasma TV is 100 times better, and my sound system is better too. No wonder theaters are dying.
Lately I've gotten in to watching "Mad Men" which is a popular show about advertising types on Madison Avenue in the 60's, hence the "Mad" part of the title. Interesting, it's basically a male oriented soap opera, but what I find interesting is that as the shows progress they are not only set against the backdrop of the news of the era (Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy assassination, Vietnam war, Civil Rights, etc.) but the show is very mid-century modern. You can watch the styles change, especially furniture and clothing. In an early episode, Miles Davis's "Kind Of Blue" had just come out and was the in thing. Last episode I watched it was The Beatles. Only problem is it's hard to find a character you actually like and root for, they are, to a man/woman, vain, shallow, dishonest, unethical, cheating low lifes in both business and personal lives.
Jeff: Lately I've gotten in to watching "Mad Men" which is a popular show about advertising types on Madison Avenue in the 60's, hence the "Mad" part of the title. Interesting, it's basically a male oriented soap opera, but what I find interesting is that as the shows progress they are not only set against the backdrop of the news of the era (Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy assassination, Vietnam war, Civil Rights, etc.) but the show is very mid-century modern. You can watch the styles change, especially furniture and clothing. In an early episode, Miles Davis's "Kind Of Blue" had just come out and was the in thing. Last episode I watched it was The Beatles. Only problem is it's hard to find a character you actually like and root for, they are, to a man/woman, vain, shallow, dishonest, unethical, cheating low lifes in both business and personal lives.
I watched the first series when it was shown in the UK by, I think, the BBC, but the subsequent series moved to a Sky subscription service. I agree that it seemed accurately reminiscent of the 50's at the beginning; I also found it difficult to relate to any of the characters, all of whom were pretty flawed.
My wife hated the programme.
Graham
Interestingly Graham, my wife is not at all fond of the show either. I wouldn't go so far as to say she hates it but she usually doesn't pay attention to it when I put it on, except to complain if I watch more than one in an evening! One thing that strikes me is that every character in it seems deeply, depressingly unhappy with their lives but as it's a soap opera of course they continue to do that which makes them unhappy. In the last season one of the main characters acquired Saarinen tulip table and stools for his office so the "mid-century" has arrived in earnest.
The other night we rewatched my favorite Stanley Kubrick movie (although I like most of his with a few exceptions), "Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb." Truly a masterpiece of understated black humor and wicked irony. Also the source of one of my favorite movie lines ever: "You can't fight in here, this is the War Room!"