TV/Movies Megathread

[Ideologue]

Stuff:

The Guest (2014).   Rarely has the better been more obviously the enemy of the good enough.  B+

Brick Mansions (2014).   Remember parkour?  Sure you do!  Despite an array of problems—hell, because of its array of problems—Brick Mansions is nice, low-rent fun.  B

Inherent Vice (2014).   Inherent Vice is a redemption, half-hearted in its way, but it's deliberate and I'm willing to recognize it as such.  (Whereas if you actually liked The Master, that statement doesn't apply: you'll probably just love this movie, and I don't get you at all.)  B

The Art of the Steal (2014).   One of 2014's most oddly-cut diamonds in the rough.  A

Blackhat (2015).   Mann's back!  And this time his form matches his movie's function, although to what extent Blackhat actually does function is a matter for some debate.  B

I also rewatched Tangled (A+ ), saw Mean Girls for the first time (B+), as well as The Canyons (D+ at James Deen's acting abilities, though pretty much everyone is terrible) and We Need to Talk About Kevin (B+).  Plus I saw Borgman, recommended by pretentious twats, though of course it is complete fucking super-garbage (F).

[celedhring]

Locke. Hilarious. Guy tries to manage the biggest pour of concrete in Europe while his life is collapsing around him (such a subtle metaphor). Tom Hardy manages to sell the material, but I really don't get the reviews the film's got. I kid you not, 50% of the film's dialogue is about concrete, and not in an ironic Tarantino way.

One of my favorites of the year.

The bizarreness of the conceit (and the fact it's less than 85 minutes long) makes it a decent enough novelty to watch, but I really didn't think it was that great. That said, Tom Hardy manages to elevate the material. The conversations with his phantom daddy as a way to lay out the pathos of the film are a pretty terrible device, for example, but he manages to sell them.

Anyway, my main criticism of the movie is that by minute 30 you know all the circumstances surrounding the main character, and nothing of note happens afterwards that involves him making decisions or having doubts over what he's doing. It's all pretty flat.

[garbon]

Really enjoying this season's "Looking". Read an interesting analysis of this show recently, where the author argued that the series shows that even with full acceptance, gays will not have exactly the same lifestyle as heteros. There is some truth to that.

I think you just like his hypochondria.

That and I would really want to fuck Russell Tovey.

Fuck?

[Malthus]

Then 1978? Definitely so.

As to monogamy, man that sounds boring.

The whole gay marriage thing was just a long, involved joke, wasn't it?

For those who wanted to get married, I would think not.

Yup. Anecdotally, these guys do exist - I have some as my neighbours, one house down - an apparently totally monogamous gay couple. Of course, I have no idea what they do in their free time, but to outward appearances at least, they are about the same as any straight couple in the area (I also don't know what any one of *them* do in their free time, when it comes to that ...    ).

[Kleves]

How the hell has there been no talk of the Man in the High Castle pilot?

I saw it, I liked it, and I hope it gets picked up. I did, however, have a few issues with it. [spoiler]For one thing, Julie seems to barely care that her sister was murdered right in front of her. When her boyfriend comes home, she has a whole discussion about the film her sister was carrying before she tells him her sister was murdered right in front of her. Her decision to take her sister's place is also never really explained. Maybe she does it out of devotion to her sister, but, again, she seemed pretty blasé that her sister was murdered right in front of her. She also didn't seem to be suffering too much under Japanese occupation, and seemed to have adapted pretty readily, including becoming a Japanese martial artist. So her motivation was something of a mystery to me.[/spoiler]

[spoiler]The other thing that really bugged me was how they handled Joe. When we're first introduced to him, he guns down a Nazi thug who is about to capture/kill a resistance leader. However, at the end he's revealed to be an apparent Nazi agent. An agent who's plan included the capture/killing of the resistance leader. There does not seem to be any reason for him to have murdered one of his comrades in order to try and aid in the leader's escape, save to fool the audience. Similarly, why does the boss Nazi bother interrogating the resistance leader? He already knows everything, and has an agent in the organization. Why waste time talking to the prisoner when his only apparent goal is to have the resistance leader beaten to death. Again, the only purpose of the scene seems to be to try and throw the audience off the scent. [/spoiler]

There were some other issues, but those were the main ones that stuck out to me. Maybe these things will be explained if the series gets picked up. In the pilot, however, there's no inkling of an explanation, and they just seem like lazy writing. With that said, I do recommend watching it.

[Eddie Teach]

So Disney's letting Netflix stream some of their less popular fare. I've seen Fantasia again, great as always. Also, Treasure Planet, which was uninspired and kind of weird.

[Josquius]

The interview- I was very pleasantly surprised. Expected it to be bad, it is quite fun

I totally failed to realise man in the high castle was happening.
It's good. Silly and unrealistic alternate history of course, but fun.

It's not supposed to be realistic. 

it would be nice to see ah handled realistically. But then given how rarely it is handled at all...

[Malthus]

My wife makes me watch Downton Abbey.

I even Had a dream about Downton Abbey the other night -

I was reading up on ants the night before, and in particular, on a behaviour known as "slave-raiding" or "pirating" whereby one ant nest will raid the nest of a different species, and steal their eggs and pupae, and raise them as a worker caste. I was struck by a passage in which the author claimed that some ant species are so specialized for 'slave-raiding' that, without these 'slaves', they can't even feed themselves - their mandibles are the wrong shape (too specialized, oversized). Apparently, some scientists took ahold of a colony, removed the 'slaves', and the 'masters' all died of starvation. Also, the 'slaves' do all the rearing of the ant's young.

Anyway, in the deam, I saw the aristocrats from 'Downton Abby' sitting around a fancy table, with all of the fancy siverware, looking quite sad - there was no food on the china plates. All of the servants were gone. The aristocrats were wearing the height of 1920s fashion, but above the collar, they had grossly oversized mandibles ... 

[Barrister]

So, Mrs B and I decided to Go Out this weekend.  We hired a babysitter and decided to go out for dinner and a movie.

It started out as kind of a disaster though.  We don't go out to see a lot of movies, and usually we wind up seeing escapist popcorn flicks.  But it's not really the season for those.  Then we decided to see American Sniper - except when we went to buy tickets it was sold out.  So, somehow, we settled on seeing Selma.

WE left two hours before the movie opening, thinking that would be plenty of time to grab dinner.  Wrong.  We were just going to grab something nearby the movie theatre, but restaurant after restaurant had huge lines.  Who knew people would be lining up to go out for dinner in mid-January?  We went further away from the theatre, and still there were lines, and now we were under an hour to go.

I spot a sketchy-looking restaurant, and drag my wife in.  The menu said "serving Edmonton since 1977" and the restaurant looked it.  However, the food was... okay.  Nothing spectacular, but decent.

Anyways, on to the movie review.  I came in with no real expectations beyond "hey, I like history, and this is a historical bio-pic about an era I don't know too much about".

It was really good.

It wasn't a hagiography of MLK, which I was kind-of expecting (though obviously he's still the hero of the movie).  It shows him with doubts and uncertainty.  It deals with his infidelity.  I'm not quite sure what to make of it's depiction of LBJ - I might have to do more reading on that.  It wasn't a "white people are/were terrible" story either - there are a number of sympathetic white characters.  But it is emphatically a black movie about black people.

Sometimes the casting was a bit odd.  Most of the characters are played by relative unknowns (at least to me), but then you get the odd extended cameo by well-known personalities like Oprah, or Cuba Gooding Jr, or Tim Roth, was kind of jarring.

So anyways, it may have been just the low expectations going in, but really quite enjoyed the movie.  Two thumbs up.

[Josephus]

Downton Abbey is pretty good. I don't need a wife to admit I watch it . 

[crazy canuck]

Downton Abbey is pretty good. I don't need a wife to admit I watch it . 

My wife got me to watch it.  I am glad she did 

[Grey Fox]

I watched, with the girlfriend, the first episode of Manhattan.

It sucked.

[Malthus]

Downton Abbey is pretty good. I don't need a wife to admit I watch it . 

It may well be good, if you watched it from the beginning.

Being made to watch it now, having avoided it to date, I have no idea who any of these people are, or what is going on. 

Yes, I get it that it is about the tribulations of an aristocratic family and their servants, but the nuances are lost on me without a primer of some sort.

[crazy canuck]

Downton Abbey is pretty good. I don't need a wife to admit I watch it . 

It may well be good, if you watched it from the beginning.

Being made to watch it now, having avoided it to date, I have no idea who any of these people are, or what is going on. 

Yes, I get it that it is about the tribulations of an aristocratic family and their servants, but the nuances are lost on me without a primer of some sort.

Well yeah, I watched the first two seasons to catch up to my wife so we could watch the rest together.

Make an effort. 

[Norgy]

Downton Abbey is pretty good. I don't need a wife to admit I watch it . 

It may well be good, if you watched it from the beginning.

Being made to watch it now, having avoided it to date, I have no idea who any of these people are, or what is going on. 

Yes, I get it that it is about the tribulations of an aristocratic family and their servants, but the nuances are lost on me without a primer of some sort.

The rich get rich, the poor get poor, that how it goes, and everybody knows.