TV/Movies Megathread

[Neil]

A Canadian commanded the International Space Station.

Besides, we're all on the same team here, whether you like it or not.

[Syt]

I'm three episodes into season 2 of Breaking Bad. Liking it a lot. The worried, meddlesome family is something that hits close to home for me.

Finished season 2. I want to punch the wife. Hard. She's by far the most unlikable character for me.

[CountDeMoney]

I'm three episodes into season 2 of Breaking Bad. Liking it a lot. The worried, meddlesome family is something that hits close to home for me.

Finished season 2. I want to punch the wife. Hard. She's by far the most unlikable character for me.

LOL, get used to that feeling, man.

[Syt]

I like Hank, though. Acting tough, but actually a level headed, regular guy.

[Tonitrus]

Hank is pretty much, overall, the most likable character on the show.

[Eddie Teach]

I like Saul.

[Darth Wagtaros]

Hank Venture? Tough?

[Eddie Teach]

Hank Venture? Tough?

Hank Schrader.

[Sheilbh]

BBC cancelled Ripper Street. ITV did the last ever Poirot and have now cancelled Marple.

I give it three months before I have a Falling Down moment

[Neil]

That's what happens when you're 'Not Economically Viable!'

[Ed Anger]

Bring back Taggart.

[Sheilbh]

Bring back Taggart.

But only old 90s Taggart

And bring back Cracker

[11B4V]

Desolation of Smaug: B+

[CountDeMoney]

Desolation of Smaug: B+

Is Smaug the coolest part of the film?

[Ideologue]

The Rescuers Down Under (1990).  Sandwiched between The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, this follow-up to the even more obscure 1977 film has never achieved the classic status of the other early Disney Renaissance films.  The question to ask is why, of all the hits they had that never received proper, Walt Disney Animation Studios-produced sequels, it was The Rescuers they chose to return to.  The answer may be its premise, centered around the Rescue Aid Society, a group of international mice dedicated to saving people in trouble anywhere in the world, although afaik they've only ever actually bothered saving human children--I certainly didn't see them do anything to help their fellow vermin at Sandleford, probably because they're racist against bunnies.

It's silly and frankly hard to comprehend--a mouse society living the shadows of the human world works better when it's confined to under a rose bush, and the notion of a world that all animals are sapient in an otherwise realistic world grows gradually more horrifying each second you spend in it--but despite one's growing objections, the RAS nonetheless gives a ready-made framework for all sorts of further adventures in a way that, say, Sleeping Beauty, let alone The Aristocats, does not.

And a better further adventure you could not ask for, at least not one featuring globe-trotting mice--and empiricism supports me here, inasmuch as I recall the first film to be decent but more than a little dull.

In any event, Down Under is a perfectly exciting movie, and it is a funny movie, coming in flavors both dry and slapstick humor thanks to Bob Newhart, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and John Candy embodied in mouse and seagull form, respectively.  And Down Under is a dark movie, as it pits the RAS' top agents against one of Disney's nastier villains, a poacher and attempted child murderer portrayed by George C. Scott.  And I'm not kidding; he literally and explicitly tries to feed a kidnapped child to crocodiles and laughs about it as he does so.  Bernard--that's Bob Newhart's chartacter--straight-up murders him.  It's pretty great.

But, in what'll sound like a backhanded compliment but isn't, the best part of The Rescuers Down Under is its first five minutes.  This is the scene that anyone who's seen it still remembers, even if dimly.  This is part where Cody, the American child that's living in the Australian Outback for reasons never adequately explained (alternatively, he's supposed to be Australian--ha ha, no), runs off into the wilderness one morning.  There, upon a mountain, he finds a colossal bird, a golden eagle with a wingspan of at least thirty feet, caught in a human trap.  He frees the bird, but in the process, in the eagle's panic she knocks him off the mountainside.  Yet, just as he's about to become human slush, the eagle saves him and carries him on a really fucking magical ride through the sky.  It's probably my favorite single, non-musical sequence in any of the Disney Renaissance films.

What is so interesting about the golden eagle is that, in a world where every animal speaks, it is one of the few mutes.  Joining her is the poacher's lizard sidekick, who also doesn't vocalize in English.  The performances of the characters are rendered silent, then, assisted in only the slightest way by bird noises in the case of the eagle and, more broadly, with hissing noises in the case of the lizard.  However, the lizard is crafted in an exceptionally unrealistic style--only Bernard and Ms. Bianca from the RAS are moreso, since they're fully anthropomorphized, bipedal animals with opposable thumbs included.

But the eagle--her name is Marahute according to Cody, and God knows how he figured it out--is animated with a jarring verisimilitude.  She even has nictitating membranes over her eyes, rendered in such detail you can even see the blood vessels inside it glow in the refracted light of the sun.  The result is an animal made altogether separate from the goofy cartoons that populate the rest of the story, both of nature and above nature.  You can understand why Cody risks death to preserve it.  You can even understand why a perverse poacher would want to kill it just to say he did.  You wind up caring more about it than you to the humans, and humans by any other name, in the film.  Because the eagle is pure and beyond nature.

B+

Antichrist (2009).  This incoherent mess of a film is also about the terrifying violence inherent to biological life, and is at its best when it is propounding its central idea that life necessarily entails far more suffering than happiness, and emphasizing its point with beyond-R ultraviolence to the generative organs of its characters.

It's at it's worst when Lars von Trier is aimlessly running around in the woods with a video camera and can't get his actors, also aimlessly running around in the woods, to stay in the fucking frame.  Half of this film is shot beautifully: the opening shower/hardcore sex/child death sequence, in black and white and overcranked, is amazing, and its glistening pearls of slowly falling water droplets clearly inspired the Slo-Mo scenes in Dredd; I also really enjoyed it when Trier used the Smudge tool or whatever to make it look like parts of the frame were warping.  The other half is hideous: approaching Paul Greengrass levels of shakiness, and violating all sorts of composition and montage rules, probably purposefully but with great ugliness.

But, yeah, this is the one movie where you can see a guy get jerked off right after he has his goober smashed so that he ejaculates blood all over his wife's shirt.  And as such I cannot say I don't recommend it at least a little bit.

C+