2025 Rolling Streaming Media Thread

Pascal's real starmaking turn was being in a viral gif with Nic Cage IIRC

all of a sudden everyone knew his name. it seemed like it anyway. like olde-tyme hollywood. he probably got invited to a lot of swanky parties. does he have to hang out with george clooney now at Lake Como. with matt damon.

i'm watching american football right now and i like the ad where doja cat lurks around a taco bell.

i still haven't watched furiosa for some reason.

Very, verrrrry skippable. (But I am the only person on earth who hated Fury Road, so.)

oh i liked fury road. i like movies that never stop moving. that have forward motion.

i know its easy to make fun of tom brady but he is such a nothing broadcaster. he's no tony romo! he's so meepy.

Romulus is EXTREMELY disappointing; it’s a load of crap.

post malone/shane gillis beer ad is a big noooooooo. i never want to see shane gillis's grinning head.

but by what standard, james? is it even good as pulpy horror fun? cuz i'm fine with that.

my standards aren't very high anymore. but i do stop watching stuff a lot if it looks too dumb. it has to be pretty dumb or just low-budget filler that is boring. there is a lot of it out there. i want to watch good stuff.

i'm still watching the Eagles win but i'm also watching amy sedaris on david letterman. man, you don't see the likes of her anymore. unless its her. she would go full weird on national t.v. i'm also watching tom green on all the late night shows a long time ago. crazy. amy can make me laugh hard! not too many people can anymore. don rickles. her. some others.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEIshHZXVoQ

I liked Furiosa better than Fury Road, it's 25% less '90s music video.

Furiosa is good - it's not as good as Fury Road, but then nothing is. But it does recognise that funny dumb Chris Hemsworth is the best Chris Hemsworth.

I’m on my little kick of watching things that were nominated (after watching almost no movies all year), and starting with the movies that are free to stream. Therefore I’m getting in those films nominated for best visual effects (Alien) and now costumes—Gladiator II, since most of the prestige films haven’t hit streaming yet.

I don’t think I ever saw the first Gladiator so I dont have the baggage of comparison. Nevertheless I had low expectations for the sequel but it was better than I expected it to be. I doubt I’ll think about it much but it was a nice way to spend an afternoon.

Romulus is not good fun, it's mostly incredibly awkward callbacks to better scenes from the earlier movies. It really is terrible, and in a really small, scuzzy way, not even terrible and preposterous on a grand stage like the two idiotic Scott Prometheus movies.

gotcha.

Many xps Pascal was a known actor before LoU, but after he became a subject of celebrity media, which is a different thing.

fun thing about Pascal is his friendship with Sarah Paulson, it's really sweet.

what are the good recentish spy shows other than slow horses? i finished binging it and wanted to continue in that vein. tried day of the jackal but it feels very slow and cheesy.

I think people are split here on The Agency? or maybe its just me who got bored of it. I really liked the first episodes and then it just dragged for me. didn't love the characters that didn't help.

I liked the first season of the Night Agent on Netflix. I've canceled my subscription but there's a second season now.

i liked that first season of The Night Agent on Netflix even though the lead guy is kind of a generic dud. it was still entertaining spy stuff. more action-y though. maybe more Tom Clancy territory.

great minds...uh...think alike! haha!

what are the good recentish spy shows other than slow horses?

I enjoyed Mr. and Mrs. Smith. And just started Black Doves, which seems promising.

i saw that the Recruit has a new season starting on Netflix and i can't remember if i even watched the first one. i probably did. and forgot all about it.

i want to go back and watch old stuff. MI-5 and the like. loads of stuff i've never seen.

Berlin Station looks kinda cool but i think its one of those odd ones that isn't streaming on the stuff i have. mgm+ or apple+ or something.

Xpost recent spy shows. Black Doves was good. However if you missed The Americans, highly recommended to see that instead

The Diplomat is sort of a spy show. That one is good.

I thought The Agency was skillfully made, but every now and then I remembered it was about the US trying to maintain control over the world, which was a bummer. I wonder if I'd like the French original better.

thanks all. maybe i'll give black doves a shot. or maybe i'll rewatch the greatest spy tv show of all time (patriot)

I liked The Agency a lot though I can see why some might find it boring. Less gunfights and explosives than most spy shows. But I thought it was excellent.

Patriot is a brilliant unconventional spy show.

Alias is a show about a... spy

Danger Mouse

The Pitt is legit :D
I watched ep 1 tonight and was glued to my seat! Love it. also grizzled Noah Wylie is hot af. holy shit was not prepared

I loved The Agency!
there’s a lot that plays out over many episodes so it’s a slow burn type of thing but when in life do you get GERE and WRIGHT and FASSBENDER doing their thing together. It’s fkn great!
But i knew right away i was onboard for it so if yr struggling to be interested it might not be yr bag

Watched the first episode of Paradise tonight. It's an NBC series (streaming on Hulu) starring Sterling K. Brown as a Secret Service agent; I'd basically describe it as 24 meets Under The Dome. (There's been an unspecified catastrophe and everybody still alive in America lives in a fake city inside a mountain in Colorado.)

I'm becoming a full movies illegally uploaded to Youtube kind of guy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpvAdeAv8KI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNNsahI49IE

If you can handle four hours of Quentin Tarantino talking about movies in the public domain/available on YouTube, it's actually a pretty good list of movies to check out:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/public-domain-movies-with-quentin-tarantino/id1204885502?i=1000527497044

as someone reminded me on the youtube thread, 1929 movies are public domain and this Classic Film Library channel on YT has a ton of obscure titles:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2T88am-BoA

A friend set up a watch party during lockdown, every Friday (now every first Friday) we WhatsApp and watch a film on YouTube - there's a list here - you should be able to get all of them still? Probably?
https://letterboxd.com/charmingpotato/tag/plague-film-club/films/

Presence on the list is very extremely not necessarily a recommendation, though if you haven't, it's worth seeing The Anderson Tapes inventing the 70s (and the nimbus around Christopher Walken even in his first feature film)

A friend set up a watch party during lockdown, every Friday (now every first Friday) we WhatsApp and watch a film on YouTube -

I did with this friends, too. We chatted over Slack. It lasted a few years but is basically done now (although we revived it to watch horror movies in October). Here's our list:

https://letterboxd.com/jaymc/tag/wmt/diary/

It was a great way to watch a lot of dumb-fun movies I'd never seen. If it was too serious and slowly paced, it killed the conversation. But movies with crazy visuals, fun needle drops, period fashion, chases and explosions, etc., were perfect.

haha, i wrote this on Facebook in 2022. i stand by it pretty much.

The 5 most popular themes in American entertainment today.

1) I am tired of being "good" and I am going to be "bad". I am the audience surrogate.
2) I am bored and/or disgusted with my job and/or my relationships. I will steal or kill. I am the audience surrogate.
3) I have been traumatized. I will kill. I am the audience surrogate.
4) I am mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore. I might need to kill. I am the audience surrogate.
5) I used to kill. I think I could probably remember how to kill again. I am the audience surrogate.

David Cronenberg's daughter, Caitlin, has a new movie up on Hulu called Humane. I might watch it. That's my kind of nepo baby. It's about the end of the world but it looks like its mostly confined to one house where people turn on each other. Which makes it less tempting, but maybe its good. Peter Gallagher. Jay Baruchel. ubiquitous television actor Enrico Colantoni.

i can't stop watching Chopped though...i'm so pitiful. it's my cold weather comfort food. what can i say? the format of that show was MADE for my brain.

i'm definitely going to watch Cuckoo tonight on Hulu. that movie looks awesome.

i loved cuckoo but a lot of ppl were split on it. i kinda think it's like no other movie i've ever seem. same goes for the director's previous film luz

Dear Hoopla.com Users,

I regret to inform you that Hoopla.com will be ceasing operations by the end of this week, December 26th. We thank you for being part of our journey to bring new experiences to life in our video platform and into your lives.

While we did not succeed in our mission to be a destination of choice for life's experiences, we nonetheless encourage everyone to continue to seek fun and connection through shared experiences and communities.

Wishing you all a Happy Holidays and the best for the New Year!

Sincerely,
Team Hoopla.com Team

Literally never heard of Hoopla.com until just now, which was probably part of the problem.

It was a service linked to public libraries, "a web and mobile streaming platform launched in 2013 that provides access to a wide range of digital media, including audiobooks, eBooks, comics, manga, music, movies, and TV shows. The service is available to users through participating public libraries, allowing library cardholders to borrow and stream digital media."

The Hoopla.com website doesn’t appear to have anything to do with the library service afaict

Looks like a place that sold tickets or something?

Hmm, don’t see anything the Hoopla from libraries closing anywhere else. It’s website is hoopladigital.com also. Hoopla.com appears to be a different event based service.

Huh, today I learned there is ... more than one Hoopla?

Knee Deep In The Hooplas

Oh thank heavens, I use Hoopla Digital through my library fairly often for ebooks and was sad. Yes hoopla.com appears to have been an event ticketing platform

Josh did you post an email from a service you had signed up for without ever knowing it existed or

FWIW tho (and depending on where you live) one could be a little worried. A couple of library systems in my area are dumping Kanopy at the end of the year due to budget cuts, and that doesn't bode well.

Libraries lose silly amounts of money on Hoopla loans and Kanopy streams.

I mostly use the Libby app as far as library offerings go, and just found out its owner, Overdrive, also owns Kanopy. Hopefully the terms are reasonable.

I wonder if part of Kanopy’s price has inflated due to an expanded library. I usually just pop in to watch a few documentaries and didn’t realize how much their catalog has expanded

Josh did you post an email from a service you had signed up for without ever knowing it existed or

Honestly, I have no idea! I guess I must have, or at least don't recall why I signed up! I'm sure there was some reason ...

Is Pluribus complete? I've been waiting to have the whole thing available before starting. (I'm asking here instead of in its own thread because I don't want to run across spoilers.)

Yes s1 finale just aired!

Saved up Culinary Class War S2 until I had finished work and... just wow. As ever, Korean game show editing remains head and shoulders above anywhere else in the world but beyond that (spoilers up to end of ep 7):

The treatment of Shin Dong-Min in the first episode was just brutal. This was literally the equivalent of having Heston Blumenthal or Ferran Adria on and telling them to their face they were yesterdays men. Also the Chinese chef who turned a pork belly slab into a giant long strip only to put it back together and make that pagoda thing - considering someone got through serving bought booze with a couple of saucers of green veg this seemed like a harsh decision.

The guy cleaning the monkfish is one of the single most impressive things I've ever seen on a cookery show.

I didn't particularly like Venerable Master getting the saving throw, especially since it was a 2-0 vote and there were plenty of 1-1s that were by definition closer and therefore would have been more deserving. Particularly since they seem to have added the square root of nothing to the All Or Nothing task.

Speaking of which All Or Nothing seems like a misstep. I'll still enjoy it but moving to all black or all white seems contrary to the aim of the show. That final edit though, all coming down to the final vote...

Can't wait for Tuesday.

And now I have fucked up the tags. Sorry

Josh did you post an email from a service you had signed up for without ever knowing it existed or

I have just read someone else on a different forum state with bafflement that this exact thing happened to him, lol

I'm firstletter.surname at Google's email and I get so much of that just from people who honestly don't know their own email address, that might have happened here?

it took a little while to get going, but the last few episodes of i love l.a. have been really funny.

We’re about halfway through the Lowdown right now and it’s so much better than any other 2025 show—not even close.

The producers of Culinary Class Wars must have been thrilled with the cliffhanger at the end of the all or nothing battle. Cynically I would assume they engineered the drama though not obvious how

just starting that episode, as aldo said getting rid of all white or all black spoons seems like a mistake, it kills the class war theme - but maybe there will be a twist.

The treatment of Shin Dong-Min in the first episode was just brutal

it was but also kinda fair imo, you can't call yourself culinary innovator and make something 20 years old, and ultimately it did look a bit basic.

That last available Culinary Wars ep, when the announcer said “And now, without further ado…”, I said “They’re now going to have much ado and end without revealing the final vote.” With 6 eps to go, does seem a lot to have just 9 or 12 carry the remainder, so expecting hijinks.

the documentary on the New Yorker on Netflix is so good it makes me want to subscribe to the New Yorker again

Up to date with Culinary Class Wars.

<Narrator: There was indeed a twist.>

They stick the landing of the All Or Nothing task pretty well and the three tasks in this bundle are all fairly good but the decision to save Venerable Sunjae continues to hang like a millstone - her team was never getting through the middle stage but the judges seem too deferential and the plainness of her food and temple cooking as a whole gets a bit of a free ride. She also cruises through the All or Nothing task despite not contributing at all to it. It's hard not to see the final two as her and Brewmaster Yun, who I dearly love but seems to be getting extra points just for not being a classical chef. This is definitely a comfort food and sides year.

ER is leaving Hulu in 11 days and I have (checks notes) 15 more seasons to get through

do you think this would qualify as a good reason for taking medical leave from work y/n

medical drama leave

I watched the first four episodes of The Chair Company last night and don't know whether I like it or loathe it. I've gotten more and more estranged from comedy, in film and tv, the older I get — definitely a me problem. I'll definitely finish this series and try to figure out what my dang deal is, but I don't have high hopes for greater self-awareness.

New year, new thread