TV/Movies Megathread

[HVC]

Looks like Futurama is dead again.

[11B4V]

Picked up, Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai today. I'll give it a watch 2morrow.

[MadImmortalMan]

The Tudors. Season 3 ep 5. OMG Charlotte Salt. I'm still drooling.

[Ideologue]

Upstream Color tomorrow.  Cineaste boss's being a bitch about the trailer not doing enough to grab her and a New York Times dude who isn't Paul Krugman, and hence doesn't matter, not reviewing it (probably yet), so I'm gonna go see the emotionally relenching relationship drama by myself.   Nevertheless, looking forward to the film qua film.  Possibly a blessing in disguise, as I plan to WEEP UNCONTROLLABLY.

[garbon]

OMG / NSFW

Gingers[spoiler], A Film For Hot Gay Red-Head Enthusiasts

The film begins with the interviewees speaking directly into the camera about the advantages and disadvantages of being ginger and concludes with each of the men jacking off until they climax. (The camera demurely keeps their faces out of view at that point which grants the men an ironic bit of privacy.)[/spoiler]

[Viking]

41 minutes and 50 seconds into the second episode of Da Vincis Demons the show was ruined for me. He said he could draw anything he had seen but he couldn't draw his mothers face.



obviously... sigh..

Da Vinci isn't interesting or charming, the mystery isn't, the mystical shit was just filler to see his drawings come to life and in italian reneissance politics the pope i evil, I already have the Borgias for that.

[CountDeMoney]

Yeah, I haven't been impressed with it at all.

[11B4V]

Lone Ranger trailer

http://www.youtube.com/user/disneymovietrailers?v=yd2C0TJTXNA

[viper37]

it does look silly.  But I still want to see this

[The Larch]

41 minutes and 50 seconds into the second episode of Da Vincis Demons the show was ruined for me. He said he could draw anything he had seen but he couldn't draw his mothers face.

I believe he already said it in his first appearance in the first episode. Anyway, the model of the Mona Lisa is not his mother, so what?

If anything ruins this show is the terrible script and the jarring CGI.

[CountDeMoney]

Lone Ranger trailer

http://www.youtube.com/user/disneymovietrailers?v=yd2C0TJTXNA

I truly have hope for this.

[Viking]

41 minutes and 50 seconds into the second episode of Da Vincis Demons the show was ruined for me. He said he could draw anything he had seen but he couldn't draw his mothers face.

I believe he already said it in his first appearance in the first episode. Anyway, the model of the Mona Lisa is not his mother, so what?

If anything ruins this show is the terrible script and the jarring CGI.

In the first episode he said he couldn't remember her face, that just suggests her identity is unknown and his father is lying about who his mother was/is. In this episode he said that her face was the only thing he couldn't draw.

- bad script? yes, I pointed out which plot points and characters were badly done (all of them), but I was willing to push through, scripts often get better over time

- jarring CGI. To be honest I have a very high threshold for special effects. Probably due to me rewatching all of Babylon5 once a year. This can get better over time. What I really do like about the series is how they integrate DaVincis notebook sketches into the CGI based exposition. That works really well. I don't care if it isn't realistic. That said, I do complain about bad CGI when the plot, pacing and acting are crap.

Edit: Lisa Giaconda (or madame Lisa or Mona Lisa) was not his mother, obviously... but they are making up so much other stuff

[Ideologue]

Upstream Color (2013).  You've got mind-control worms!  But unlike how we once experienced such parasitic invertebrates in Star Trek: The Next Generation, there is nary an exploding head to be found, and this is reflected in the final score.

Upstream Color is a sci-fi romance--not in the Princess of Mars sense, but more along the lines of Safety Not Guaranteed, in that a vaguely explained SFnal conceit is used to explore broken humans and their relationships, but not using the more concrete, more conventional, but ultimately one suspects more effective methods deployed for that film.  Whereas I complained that there was a regrettable lack of ambiguity in Safety, mystery and confusion reign supreme throughout Color--and while it actually works, if somewhat uncleanly, on the science fiction level, the romance needed something, just a little something, more.

Kristine is kidnapped and subjected to--well, a robbery, certainly, and perhaps an experiment.  Placed within her body are worms which secrete a mind-altering substance, rendering her totally susceptible to suggestion.  Under the worms' spell, she is directed to destroy her own life for the financial gain of her captors, wiping out bank accounts and any positive credit history she had, and at the end of this ordeal she loses her nice upper-middle-class CGI editor job along with a week's worth of memories, not to mention some other things.

In time, she rebuilds some semblance of a life, at least managing to survive.  The film begins in earnest when she meets Jeff, with whom she soon learns she shares a similar trauma, as well as a more mysterious and inexplicable connection.

This is Shane Carruth's first movie since the revelation that was 2004's Primer--but it feels like it was shot the next day.  For one thing, Shane Carruth (playing Jeff, as he played the questionable protagonist of Primer) has hardly aged at all, the skinny little bastard.

But more importantly, the visual and narrative style is immediately familiar to anyone who's seen that movie--in fact, it may be even beyond Primer in terms of what Carruth chooses to include and not to include in terms of dialogue and revelation.  Indeed, while Primer gave you a decent primer on its rules, expect no exposition here.  The problem is that the techniques that worked in a totally cerebral time travel film force an uncomfortable and undesired distance in what is, at its core, a romantic drama.  The film tends toward moments rather than scenes, and while some may be borne emotionally fully by the undeniable craft, these moments without connective tissue fail to resonate as fully as they would and how the acting, the words, and the beauty of the shots and editing and my God the sound design (!) suggests they so very much should.  I did not weep uncontrollably.  And that makes Upstream Color a qualified failure.

No spoilers, but the film also ends about three minutes two late.  There is a largely perfect last shot that would've probably knocked it up half a grade point, if the opportunity had been seized.  You'll see what I mean.

Oh, and another thing: note that no law enforcement officer shows up in any of these moments, despite no doubt being a welcome presence.  There, I just absolutely ruined the movie for the nitpicker in you.

B

[Razgovory]

Looks like Futurama is dead again.

The last season was pretty weak.

[Ideologue]

For those in more metropolitan areas than mine, this movie Disconnect looks pretty good.  It's by relatively new director Henry Alex Rubin (he co-directed Murderball, did second unit on Copland, which I guess means he filmed the part where Rocky got into a car accident).  It appears to be the spiritual successor The Net, that is, if The Net took place in 2013 and were not fucking retarded, with a dash of Magnolia.

It may or may not have Kleves' girlfriend's tits in it.

Richard Roeper gave it four stars.  This means appropriately little, but I admit he sold me on it.