TV/Movies Megathread

[viper37]

Official Competition - good comedy. Penelope Cruz, especially, is terrific. English trailer:

Edit: Also loved Cruz in the latest Almodovar and she's on the list of very suspicious ageless film stars. Up there with Paul Rudd.  She's just great

1:16, when Antonio Banderas does his thing to ready himself, I once saw him describe a "famous actor" doing that very thing before shooting a scene in an interview and saying it was mildly disconcerting for him

[Sheilbh]

God I love a deserved one star hatchet job. I will possibly watch this film:

Blackbird review – Michael Flatley's fabulously bad spy tale is a classic of egosploitation cinema
In various rakishly-angled hats, the Riverdance star wrote, directed and stars in a jet-setting Bond knock-off that plays out like the unsexy bits of a mid-80s porn film
Peter Bradshaw
@PeterBradshaw1
Wed 31 Aug 2022 22.00 BST

Since this increasingly legendary film starring Michael Flatley was briefly aired at London's Raindance film festival in 2018 – a screening from which the media were barred – reports of it have been scattered, disjointed, unreliable. Like witnesses to a 10-bus pile-up on top of children coming out of a nursery school, those who saw it were traumatised and gibbering. The trailer which finally dropped online earlier this year was very disturbing, as it confirmed that the film really does exist.

Riverdance hoofer Flatley really has produced, written, directed and starred in his own film in which he plays Victor Blackley, a supercool secret agent codenamed "Blackbird", leader of an undercover special forces unit called "the Chieftains", like the folk band. Very often, Flatley has a secret half-smile with narrowed eyes; at other times his face is strangely blank and yet intent, like a tourist who has swum away from the other holiday-makers in the Mediterranean to secretly relieve himself in the sea.

When Victor failed to prevent his wife being killed by terrorists in some godless foreigner-jungle or other (the agonised flashbacks are not quite clear on the point) he was deeply upset. His wife's burial takes place in the grounds of Victor's spectacular home in the Irish Republic, filmed at Flatley's own mansion Castle Hyde House in County Cork. (Weirdly, however, his secret agent activities seem to be coordinated from Westminster, by a shadowy fixer played by Patrick Bergin.)

Victor wears a black hat at a rakish angle for the funeral service. He quits secret-agenting and saunters enigmatically off to run a luxury Caribbean hotel, nursing his broken heart and wearing a white tuxedo with a panama hat, also at a rakish angle, perhaps imagining himself to be a mix of Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca and Sean Connery as 007; he gives orders in a sub-Liam-Neeson growl. But when a sinister arms dealer played by Eric Roberts shows up as a hotel guest, and is engaged to his old friend Vivian (Nicole Evans) who has no idea of what a rotter he is, it is clear that Victor is going to have resume his secret agent vocation to destroy him.

In a way, it is amazing that Flatley is able to fulfil a 12-year-old boy's fantasy of being a secret agent, with a 12-year-old's idea of what a secret agent actually does. The acting and writing are like the non-sexy bits that come between the sexy bits in a porn film made in 1985. Flatley has loads of pouting women in bikinis everywhere, doing nothing. Everyone appears to have taken extra-strong OxyContin tablets before the cameras rolled. Each line is calculated to induce a nervous breakdown in the audience. When Michael Flatley actually has to hold up a sim card and say: "This holds the formula – it can kill millions of people!" I had to lie down on the floor while a team of paramedics gave me oxygen.

The big scene is when Flatley and Eric Roberts, both lavishly tuxed, play a game of high-stakes poker, a confrontation of alpha-male hombres which is clearly supposed to have the charge of 007 playing Le Chiffre at chemin de fer, but which actually has all the excitement of a nil-nil draw between Grimsby Town and Tranmere Rovers. And when Flatley punches out a henchman-baddie 10 times his size, it is a moment of unintentional comedy on a scale to rival the opening ceremony for the Olympic Games.

Really, I wanted Flatley to put his arms ramrod-straight down by his sides and then dance over the prostrate bodies of his enemies. Let's hope there will be dancealong screenings of Blackbird in which audiences can stand up in rows, link arms and express their complex feelings about this film in a choreography of their own.

Blackbird is released on 2 September in cinemas in the UK and Ireland.

[Josephus]

Anyone watch Animal Kingdom? It's a very underrated show, not much talk about it. It's very good. It's basically about a family run by Ellen Barkin, with four adult sons and one nephew, who engage in crimes like bank heists etc. out of L.A. But it's also about the family dynamic and power struggle within it. If you havent seen it I highly recommend it.

[celedhring]

God I love a deserved one star hatchet job. I will possibly watch this film:

I don't know it looks more like the kind of so-bad-it's-bad film where it's more fun to read the reviews of it than whatching it.

[Sheilbh]

I don't know it looks more like the kind of so-bad-it's-bad film where it's more fun to read the reviews of it than whatching it.

Yeah - it's already been picked up by the cult cinema in London. I may see if it gets added to the roster of regulars.

[crazy canuck]

I don't know it looks more like the kind of so-bad-it's-bad film where it's more fun to read the reviews of it than whatching it.

Yeah - it's already been picked up by the cult cinema in London. I may see if it gets added to the roster of regulars.

Unsexy bits of an 80s porn film has got to be the best cinematic insult I have read. The reviewer Must have been waiting for a special moment to pull that one out of the bag.

[Berkut]

The Sopranos.

Oddly enough, I never actually really watched the Sopranos. Maybe a season or two at the beginning.

So I watched all 7 seasons the last few months.

Overall, kind of "meh". It is not nearly as good as The Wire, for example.

And the ending? WTF? Screen to black? That's just...dumb.

[celedhring]

Went around and finished Sandman. Stand by my original opinion, when the show is good it's because the base material is good, rather than it being a great adaptation. The efforts to create a season-long arc are pretty bad and feel forced, and the show shines when it's allowed to just tell standalone narratives, like the Death episode or the 11th episode (it helps that Dream of a Thousand Cats is one of my favorite Sandman stories, and I have a professional interest in the Calliope story).

[frunk]

Just started watching Kleo on NPR's recommendation.

Young woman with bad haircut, more interesting and likeable than hott, works as assassin for the Stasi just as the wall is coming down.

Likeable and interesting might be a German thing.  Like the chick in Run Lola Run/Bourne Identity.

I just started watching it tonight; rather enjoyable fun.

I just finished it today.  Overall enjoyable with some really dumb moments.  Too many action sequences have really dumb sequences of events, and too frequently one character will not kill another even though they have every opportunity and motive to do so, or kill/attempt to kill someone without a good reason.  It gets pretty random after a certain point.

It's like someone really liked John Woo style standoffs, but didn't have the patience to maintain them for any length of time.

[crazy canuck]

The Sopranos.

Oddly enough, I never actually really watched the Sopranos. Maybe a season or two at the beginning.

So I watched all 7 seasons the last few months.

Overall, kind of "meh". It is not nearly as good as The Wire, for example.

And the ending? WTF? Screen to black? That's just...dumb.

I agree with the Wire being better.  But iirc the Sapranos was ground breaking stuff for its time, but now looks a bit meh compared to what we now get on our streaming services.

[viper37]

The Sopranos.

Oddly enough, I never actually really watched the Sopranos. Maybe a season or two at the beginning.

So I watched all 7 seasons the last few months.

Overall, kind of "meh". It is not nearly as good as The Wire, for example.

And the ending? WTF? Screen to black? That's just...dumb.

I really liked the Sopranos, all seasons.  I was frustrated with the ending too, I thought I missed something, but no, that's the author's choice to fuck with us.  I still think it's one of the greatest tv show produced.

Never watched The Wire though, didn't appeal to me at the time.

[grumbler]

The genius of the Sopranos was that it always left us uncertain as to whether we pitied Tony, or loathed him.  An ambiguous ending to an ambiguous show worked for me.  I'm quite sure that Tony was dead 30 second after the fade to black, but others hold differently, and that's okay.

[Tamas]

The genius of the Sopranos was that it always left us uncertain as to whether we pitied Tony, or loathed him.  An ambiguous ending to an ambiguous show worked for me.  I'm quite sure that Tony was dead 30 second after the fade to black, but others hold differently, and that's okay.

I read that the show creator said in an interview once that the point is - does it matter? His life could only end being shot or being sent to prison, meantime he had to spend it always looking behind his back even on a family outing. Which works for me.

[Josephus]

The Sopranos.

And the ending? WTF? Screen to black? That's just...dumb.

They shot him.

[Berkut]

The genius of the Sopranos was that it always left us uncertain as to whether we pitied Tony, or loathed him.  An ambiguous ending to an ambiguous show worked for me.  I'm quite sure that Tony was dead 30 second after the fade to black, but others hold differently, and that's okay.

I wonder if my ambivalence is because I never pitied Tony, just loathed him. He was a despicable human being, and even his "virtues" turned out to just be complete selfishness.