TV/Movies Megathread

[Admiral Yi]

https://www.npr.org/2023/10/20/1207129195/flower-moon-author-recounts-the-conspiracy-to-murder-the-osage-people

NRP interview with the author of Flower Moon.  This was the very young FBI's first major case.

[The Brain]

The Fall of the House of Usher, S1. I thought it was great, I was entertained. I didn't care for the times they got preachy or namedropped actual persons, it cheapened the proceedings.

[The Brain]

The Conference. Local government builds team spirit, bodycount. As Swedish slashers go it is fine. Some of the references got a mild chuckle, but I don't know if they travel.

[viper37]

Reginald the Vampire

Fast food worker gets turned into a vampire and has life turned upside down.  Low budget comedy vampire show from Canada.  Doesn't seem that good.

The Winter King.

I'm up to six episodes now.
I'm less enthusiastic than I was about The Last Kingdom.  It has a lower budget and the acting is not as good, not as equal.  The actress playing Guenievre seems lively enough, but the main actors playing Derfell and Arthur are a bit wooden.  Nimüe seems, I don't know, absent a bit.

I'm not sure about the choices of costumes.  I get why the main actors aren't always in chainmail or wearing helmets, like any other period shows like this, shooting for 8-12hrs straight, it gets heavy to wear all the time.  I'm not too certain about the civilian attires.  Maybe they're right, maybe they ain't.  I don't know much about Romano-British culture of the 6th century.  I'll give them a plus for shooting javelins during a combat scene instead of straight charging with their swords, or shooting arrows.

Stuff like this seem entirely plausible for the time period.

This, for a female pagan warrior, I am much less certain.

[celedhring]

Started watching the House of Usher. The first episode is a bit weak - a lot of teasing and sleight of hand but nothing really happens - and the whole thing looks like it's going for "it's Succession but with Poe", and that's a comparison that few shows can probably survive. But I'll keep watching since I know a lot of people (including in here), that dig it.

One of the things that it's made me realize is that despite the longstanding cultural obsession with Poe, and being one of the very first modern-ish detective stories, we've never had an Auguste Dupin procedural 

[FunkMonk]

Question for the non-Americans:

Is Edgar Allen Poe a big thing by himself or is he just a part of the American monoculture exported overseas?

[Oexmelin]

Read him in lit. classes in French, not least because he was enthusiastically translated by the famous 19th century French poet Charles Baudelaire - if that gets to what you were asking.

[Jacob]

Edgar Allan Poe is a big thing by himself. He's from the era before American hegemonic culture.

[Sheilbh]

Edgar Allan Poe is a big thing by himself. He's from the era before American hegemonic culture.

Yeah. I agree. I think outside the US there's relative few cultural ideas of pre-20th century America, but he's up there - maybe with Melville and Whitman.

Although in the case of Britain his reception was a little bit roundabout. Wilde was a huge fan and I believe he was very influential on the Decadent movement, so Beardsley did illustrations for British editions of his work etc. I could be wrong but my guess is that reputation among British writers came through Baudelaire.

Moby Dick was a huge critical hit in Britain almost as soon as it was released, but Whitman was also strongly advocated by Wilde. Obviously it's in the texts themselves but it is interesting that the early proponents of these great American writers - and the literature of this butch new republic - were so queer in Britain. Perhaps because, in a 19th century context, there is a queer possibility implicit in a leveling republicanism? I've never really thought about it before but it is a little striking

[celedhring]

Over here he was only published posthumously, but he became very popular in the second half of the XIXth century and his influence lingered. Spanish decadentists and later Gen'98ers loved him. Baroja - imho the premier Spanish* writer of the XXth century - was an admirer and has some beautifully Poe-esque passages in several of his master works.

I first discovered him as a child when a Spanish quiz show ran a Poe-themed episode (that show's director was famously a fan and he himself penned a classic horror antology Spanish TV show).

*As in being from Spain.

[Josquius]

Define big thing.
What others are saying here may be right historically and amongst artsy sorts, but amongst the general public I don't think Poe is particularly known beyond references in The Simpsons et al.
He's not really on the same level as the likes of Dickens, Austen, etc...
Certainly nothing I ever ran into at school (but then same too Dickens and Austen)

[celedhring]

I disntinctly remember Poe being brought up often during my early narrative courses at film school - the Purloined Letter and William Wilson were amply discussed, for example. And this was a Spanish uni.

I feel that there's so much horror/fantasy in our mainstream culture nowadays, compared to say, the 1990s, that authors like Poe have kinda been lost in the shuffle. When I was growing up, if you were attracted to "interesting" supernatural stories (as opposed to whatever slasher), the options were much more limited and it was hard to escape somebody like Poe.

[Josephus]

At uni, (in Canada), i took a course on American lit. there was a lot of shit. Thoreau, Walden, Dickinson....but then we did Poe. That saved the course for me.

But, as I said earlier, that's what's wrong with House of Usher...it really has nothing to do with the Poe stories, other than borrowed names and settings. yes, there's a black cat, yes there's a raven, etc etc.

And the scares were fabricated.....loud music and crashes kind of thing. I really struggled through the 5 episodes so far.

[celedhring]

The issue with Poe - and also Lovecraft - that makes them sort of special is that their stories are very internal - they have very little action and take place mostly inside their characters' minds as they are flooded by fear, guilt, paranoia, madness...

This also makes them terrible material for movie adaptations despite their enduring popularity. I mean, the Corman movies are charming fun trash, but let's be real...

EDIT: One of the exceptions might be Fellini's Toby Dammit, whose original story has the flimiest of plots (that here is turned into the last 30 seconds of the film, the rest is made up), but that Fellini manages to turn into what I feel is the ideal of a Poe adaptation - the way how Dammit's internal turmoil is projected into how he views the world around him. It's an extremely loose adaptation, but one that feels right in spirit.

[Duque de Bragança]

As said previously, the translation of Poe by Baudelaire means he is huge name by himself.
Genre cinema fans are also very familiar through adaptations, even if done by Corman. 

Comparing with Lovecraft who really got recognition not so long ago, Poe has been well-known for quite a while.