What We Do In The Shadows. I enjoyed this, but it seems unnecessary to alter the setting and cast British actors in the leads. You’ve just genericised away half of what made it interesting. It’s funny and everyone involved did well.
I will say, living in Bensonhurst Brooklyn which is practically a stone’s throw from Staten Island, the location has added an extra bit of humor for us.
The Handmaid’s Tale season 3: The Emotional Assfuck Continues, on Hulu.
Still fantastic, still dystopian, still leaves me feeling like I need to drink a scotch whilst showering and simultaneously punching something… yet I still come back for more. If that’s not the mark of a great show, I don’t know what is.
*caveat emptor, I do heart me some dystopian shit… and this show puts the dys in dystopian.
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Fleabag. Started it not knowing what I was getting into and ended up binging the entire 12 episodes over two nights. Brilliant and gut-wrenching and funny. The end scene of season 2 had me sobbing at my iPad at 2am. I tend to cry a lot at movies, but it passes. This one is sticking with me and I’m thinking about it all day.
I told a friend about it and he couldn’t get through the first episode, so YMMV.
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Happy. A completely stupid silly series that made me laugh a lot. Completely ridiculous.
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Anyone watch Dark on Netflix? Added it to my watchlist at some point but never got to it, just saw a second season dropped.
It was interesting. English dub was terrible. First season left me with a lot of questions and I’m looking forward to watching season 2.
Worth a watch then, thanks! I hate dubbing - I watch most things with subtitles anyway so the German (?) shouldn’t be an issue.
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IIRC we all enjoyed the first season when it came out. Subs not dubs.
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Can’t explain it, but I like this more than I should. I vote for an update to the thread heading - “The Glass Teat, Or ‘Television’: Subs not dubs.”
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The Get Down. A mythical re-imagining of the birth of hip-hop, a comic-book crime series, a heartfelt drama, all mashed up. Raps from Nas, Jimmy Smits looking gangsterish, Giancarlo Esposito looking stressed, all in 1970s New York. Some of it is a touch too naive for my taste, but the whole conceit of the show, a kind of kung fu dojo of music, is so much my jam it could have been created specifically for me.
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Neon Genesis Evangelion. In a way, this is anime personified. Ridiculous, brilliant, crude, bombastic, juvenile, trying hard to say something, and mostly succeeding, but shitting the bed while doing it. I really enjoy it and it’s a classic, but there’s a lot wrong with it that is stuff that anime is still doing today. Rewatch inspired by a certain podcast.
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I’ve been seeing this mentioned all over. I was too embarrassed to watch something so horny when I was younger, but now that I’m an old man, I figured a reminder of what adolescence was like wouldn’t be so bad. Your summary sounds about right to me, minus any nostalgia. I felt particularly let down by the final two episodes, which struck me as focusing exclusively on psychology while adopting a model of psychology of simplistic implausibility so great I don’t know who it could have been intended to seem insightful to.
Come to think of it, I’d put it in a category with The Prisoner of old shows which are interestingly weird, but have serious problems judged from the present.
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It’s pretty advanced, in anime terms, for a series from 1995, but subverting certain anime tropes and leaning into others makes me wonder how smart it actually is and how much of it is just some weird luck or circumstance. There was obviously a lot of work done in taking stuff from Christianity, but I can’t tell how much was just a surface-level skim. The philosophy on display is basic and a bit insulting, much like psychology.
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Pseudo philosophy/psychology/theology drive me nuts. I don’t mind opposing points of view or foundations of though that differ from mine, but it really drives me crazy when characters in any medium wax intellectual but it is really just a bunch a gibberish. I’m sure I’ll rub some people the wrong way for this, but this is something that drives me up the wall with Metal Gear Solid games. They are praised for the depth of their storytelling and I think it’s all a load a rubbish. But that’s just me.
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Having studied philosophy, I expect any philosophy in media to seem to me so shallow and sloppy that it rarely bothers me anymore. The Terminator series illustrates the range of this nicely, I think: the original was like the story of Oedipus, where the thing SkyNet did to try to prevent its fate turned out ironically to be what brought that fate about. Pretty standard; there’s enough to hang a movie on, but nobody comes out having actually learned anything. Terminator 2 built on that about as well any media does-it clearly laid out the option from the first movie and explained in a plot-relevant way that determinism was wrong. Yay!
Then Terminator 3 comes along with fatalism, which nobody in the West takes seriously and is metaphysical nonsense in either a Christian or atheist context. Insulting crap.
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Sounds like someone got all the recessive genes…
I particularly enjoyed (by which I mean fucking detested) the flip from T2’s hope to T3’s “Actually there’s nothing you can do, it’s all fucked.” What on Earth were they thinking.
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Perpetual Grace, Ltd. A crime series with a touch of quirk, which sits somewhere near Fargo, with an unlikely scheme, an unlikely hardcase, and some off-kilter humour. Jimmi Simpson isn’t bad, but he’s playing someone subdued and downtrodden, so it’s difficult to shine when you’re up against a rabid Ben Kingsley, a dreary Luis Guzman, and a stellar supporting cast in Kurtwood Smith, Timothy Spall, Terry O’Quinn, and Hana Mae Lee. Perhaps a touch too odd in places.
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