TV/Movies Megathread

[Eddie Teach]

Which one?

The first one, I think. About the pig-fucking PM.

[Sheilbh]

Which one?

The first one, I think. About the pig-fucking PM.

One of my favourites

[celedhring]

The PM one has an amazing setup, but squanders the premise imho.

That happens to most Black Mirror eps I have watched, though.

[Sheilbh]

Agreed. I think White Bear and Fifteen Million Merits are the best on that front.

The pig-fucking one is hilarious though and still by some distance the funniest (and, possibly, sadly, the truest)

[celedhring]

I'd probably have liked Fifteen Million Merits more if I didn't HATEHATEHATE all those talent shows 

Favorite one is The Entire Story of You, but I haven't watched the Christmas Special yet.

[Sheilbh]

See I watched it with the guilt that knowing I watch those shows

Edit: Also a brilliant performance by Daniel Kaluuya who's one of my favourite young actors right now. He was immensely charming in the Fades.

[celedhring]

See I watched it with the guilt that knowing I watch those shows

Edit: Also a brilliant performance by Daniel Kaluuya who's one of my favourite young actors right now. He was immensely charming in the Fades.

I was watching "Fifteen" and thinking; hey, that's an interesting world they are describing, I can believe us ending in some place like that in the future, the lead is great, great chemistry with the lass... hey, wait, why the hell are they going to Britain's Got Talent now????!?!?!?!

[mongers]

Is 'The Book Thief' worth, persevering with as it's making me lose the will to live*.






* yes and no doubt some Languishite would thus recommend I see it through to the end. 

[Admiral Yi]

It doesn't get any better.  Just more of the same.

[Razgovory]

Intensified hatred of Arabs and Muslims and people we mistake for Arabs and Muslims, like Sikhs.

Yeah, Spike Lee was just making that part up?

That sounds awful.  Whoever is doing that should stop this instant. 

I'll compile a list and send it to you, and you can complain to them.  You are going to need to clear some of your hard drive though.  Actually Maybe you should just buy a new one.  This will be a big file.

[mongers]

It doesn't get any better.  Just more of the same.

Thanks, I'll cut my losses. 

[garbon]

Finally saw Reservoir Dogs.

[Eddie Teach]

Is 'The Book Thief' worth, persevering with as it's making me lose the will to live*.

Quit yer whinin'.

[Ideologue]

The true story imposes a limit, but just 'cause something's true doesn't make it better.

Not too sure about that. True stories have a plus for me when they convey extreme examples of human behavior. Anybody can make up some bizarre story, knowing that something happened for real makes it more gripping, to me, than a more tightly executed but fake story.

That's why, say, Conspiracy spooks the hell out of me while Fatherland doesn't.

A matter of tastes, of course.

OK, what I was going to say earlier was that "It depends on the story."  Miserablist stories are almost always better if they're true.  (If Fury had been a true story, it might've been a great movie.  It wasn't, so it was contrived shit--because it was so obviously contrived to make you feel like shit, it became boring and by turns laughable.)

And the notion that a story is true can lend a fictionalized retelling a frisson of relevance or immediacy, even when it's largely made-up, e.g. Pain & Gain.

But the problem with true stories is that people tend to be boring and stupid, and biographical fealty thus tends to flatten things with human beings' boring and stupid natures.  Plenty of movies transcend that and really grab you, even if only the last ten minutes--like DDA does (or, for an odd comparison, like The Right Stuff does).  But you can constantly feel the obligation to the facts that weighs them down.  A lot of true stories don't transcend their obligation to human flatness at all--The Social Network, Lincoln, The Wolf of Wall Street, The Theory of Everything, The Imitation Game.  And those movies are at least pretty good (though they're mainly just okay).  TWoWS is a good example of what I mean--that movie has a potentially perfect ending, then goes on for like another hour, because Jordan Belfort's life went on for another hour's worth of... well, just stuff.

Of course, you have the ones that play more like historical fiction than biopics, like 12 Years a Slave or Lawrence of Arabia.  Those certainly transcend their obligation.

[The Minsky Moment]

The caper plot, yes, but neither the assault on American capitalism nor American racism (specifically post-9/11 racism) which are such hugely important parts of the weave. It's gotta be NYC.

Could be any major financial center other than Dubai.
Same corruption/same fears