itt: non-english-language netflix series you recommend (or not) and commentary thereon

I have a fair tolerance for this stuff (e.g. watched the entirety of the very mediocre Black Lake on iPlayer) but could not get through more than half of Salamander or Witnesses - be warned.

The bbc4 phenom always makes me think that there must be tv snobs in Denmark or wherever going fucking nuts for midsomer murders & lewis

― "The" Blink-182 (wins), 15. oktober 2017 17:42 (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

They're on almost every saturday night. I'm not sure that many snobs watch it, though. I used to watch so much Rebus growing up, I picked up an awful fake scottish accent.

They're on almost every saturday night

this is bizarrely pleasing to me

Tonight it was Inspector George Gently, followed by Murder City and The Honorable Woman. Then a couple of episodes of Upstairs Downstairs to end the night.

Actually my ex-girlfriend was watching all this, when she wasn't busy writing queer analyses of ancient greek tragedies. She was kinda snobbish, and so so cool :(

There are 3 worthwhile Japanese shows

MIDNIGHT DINER - endearing and heartwarming story about the people who frequent a late night diner in a working class Tokyo neighborhood. This is a phenomenon across Asia with a (good) Korean version and a (bad) Chinese version and a bunch of movie spinoffs. Heartwarming in the best possible way.

SAMURAI GOURMET - not as good as midnight diner but it’s the story of a salaryman who deals with retirement by exploring local restaurants.

JAPAN STYLE ORIGINATOR - possibly the only lifestyle magazine show on Netflix but it’s great for the insight into Japanese culture and features such informative episodes as the 50 cheapest things to eat with rice, 25 ways to eat your New Years mochi and a goat of ‘how it’s made’ type segments where they look at how various Japanese crafts are made. Very relaxing TV.

A goat?

I loved OCCUPIED and very much want the second series (basically, fossil-fuel-rich Norway goes completely green and shuts down its oil/gas industry, and Russia stages a "soft" invasion to take over)

More soapie-ish but very well done: 30 DEGREES IN FEBRUARY: various Swedes head off to Thailand to escape their troubled lives, discover that unfortunately they are still themselves

finished SUBURRA (italian), began MAR DE PLÁSTICO (spanish)

Salamander is the one I was thinking of

oh, that was quite good!

I have a few of these Euro-tv streaming subscriptions, so I forget which series are on Netflix vs. the other ones.

Spiral/Engrenage (might be on Netflix?) is French, and was billed as France's answer to The Wire. It isn't quite as intricate, but it is really good in other ways.

Oh, another Netflix one I watched recently -- Silver Spoon -- it's Russian. A bit silly and over the top in parts, and it would make for an interesting discussion whether it's implicitly/explicitly critical of Putin/oligarchs or not.

SPIRAL was on UK TV in the noir slot, and I liked the little bit I watched but I missed too much of the start to get properly embedded.

MAR DE PLÁSTICO is kind of boring, also the chiselled cop who's the lead is like a bland pierce brosnan mini-me

ok it just woke up a bit -- murder leads to nasty racial tension in a southern spanish town -- but the lead cop fights off 20 ppl like he's batman, that's the boring bit

seriously - just watch "Mafiosa" on CH4/Walter Presents ..
so good.
S1 was ok despite the presence of some over acting, but things really improved from S2 onwards.

season 2 of Okkupert and 3 of Gomorrah - hurry up!

where are you watching gomorrah?

from torrent sites, always. I work on the flawed presumption that if the torrents have subtitled versions of a Euro series, then it must be on Netflix.

haha yes it's available via amazon but not amazon prime (which i do pay for) so i guess that's why it's subtitled -- so i can stump up some more when i'm feeling flush

Spiral (S2 and S3 especially) is super good

Method is up now (at least in the UK). Based on the first episode it seems like the synthesis of every other loose-cannon-profiler-with-personal-demons cop show. I’ll stick with it though. Khabensky is usually good.

I just watched the first episode of the South Korean procedural Stranger. Some of the acting/exposition was way over the top (A string of surprise witnesses, each more surprising than the last!)but it was strangely compelling.

At the more serious end of the scale, the French sky show the Bureau on amazon prime was excellent, easily putting to shame the similar stuff I've seen from the BBC recently.

previously mentioned midnight diner + hibana: spark is decent too, from a novel by matayoshi naoki that won the akutagawa prize, about a struggling manzai duo who try to break into the world of japanese standup.

I finished Method and though it seals liberally from The Bridge, Sherlock, Dexter, Nikita, and pretty much every other crime show of the last two decades, it ends up being pretty great. The tone is all over the place at the start but it settles into an OTT nihilist bleakness that would be difficult to get away with without such good leads. It’s completely ludicrous, pitch-black and Problematic in a number of ways but Konstantin Khabensky and Paulina Andreeva pull it through somehow.

I think there must have been some legal action threatened wrt plagiarism as the producer of Dexter is credited as one of the creators. It’s vastly better though.

Terrace House: Boys and Girls is the only answer to this.

just started THE METHOD and also APACHES (which literally has *record scratch* "my name is miguel, you're wondering how i got here" as its kicker)

just finished WITNESSES s2 (on bb4 rather than netflix) -- which was colossally silly with a handful of half-realised ideas

think APACHES is going to be garbage, so far (6 minutes in) there's been a double flashback and then a flash forward

I loved Au Service de la France and have been eagerly awaiting S2 for some time now.

Spiral is back on BBC4 this week, i think.

On an (almost) completely different note, i found the first season of Call My Agent / Dix Pour Cent quite charming and am pleased that the second is now up on Netflix. It's a fairly gentle comedy with French stars (including Audrey Fleurot) playing fictionalised versions of themselves. Adjani and Binoche are apparently in S2.

That looks like something I need to see.

Spiral is back on BBC4 this week, i think.

whaaaaaaaa

anyone watch dad of light yet

Xp, season six starts on the 30th!

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Terrace House: Boys and Girls is the only answer to this.

― Yerac, Monday, December 18, 2017 12:28 PM (two days ago) Bookmark]

aloha state starts getting wild in the later parts

Yeah I watched Aloha State first because I was living in Oahu while they were filming it, but the Tokyo one is overall better. There were some serious duds on Aloha State.

Two episodes into La Mante and...it’s not good. Cheapo copycat serial killer drama though Carol Bouquet obviously elevates it.

Dark looks good after one episode. Shades of Donnie Darko and the unfortunate comparison's gonna be to stranger things but it looks suitably creepy. Had to switch off the dubbing after like 5 mins ugh it was bad.

Eight episodes into Dark and the plot still hasn't completely fallen apart yet so that's good I guess. Compared to the bright consumerist Germany of Deutschland 83, the 80s we see here is dull and rainy and still looks like the 60s or 70s. Pity the characters are such non-entities.

Not a series but we watched An Off-Day Game, a Malayalam art film that Netflix is carrying for some reason (with subtitles) and thought it was great. For a fairly low-budget film, the shots are gorgeous and the story is brutal but reveals itself gradually. Basically, it's about four middle-aged guys who get drunk on an election day [which are holidays in Kerala] and the way their dark sides are progressively revealed in the way they treat each other. It probably helps to have a basic understanding of Kerala politics and Indian caste and colour prejudices and discrimination. (Broadly, the two main political coalitions are a coalition led by the Communists who are probably the most anti-caste party and a Congress-led coalition who would be centre-left by mainstream Indian standards but function as the more right-wing side in the context of Kerala.)

There’s a dystopian Brazilian thing, name is something like SIX PERCENT, that I didn’t see mentioned yet which I watched a little of once, wasn’t compelled enough to keep watching.

no hype yet for THE SWEET TOOTH SALARYMAN?

http://i0.wp.com/i.imgur.com/qeWRJXU.jpg

Pity the characters are such non-entities.

Yeah the actors/acting doesnt sparkle much, but I'll give it a go.

no hype yet for THE SWEET TOOTH SALARYMAN?

― the ghost of tom, choad (thomp), Saturday, 30 December 2017 3:11 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I mentioned it on the other Netflix thread. It’s a fun show and inspired me ordering anmitsu in Tokyo the other week.

haha i don't know what the experience i had watching the first episode was but it certainly wasn't 'fun'

the obsessive pleasure kintarou finds in desserts seems ... hm. positive coverage normally says it's about the necessity of small pleasures among a dehumanising work culture, but it seems a bit of a moral void. the necessary complement to the dehumanising work culture ... kantarou's joy itself a capitalist product ...

tho mb if i wasn't prejudiced against hyper-sweet asian desserts already i wouldn't have had this reaction, to be fair: i found all the food porn shots about as appetising as had they focused instead on glistening, beautifully-framed, superlatively-lit lumps of human excrement

I watched 3 episodes of Salaryman but it's not really grabbing me. The visits to sweet shops are a little too tedious/tidy.

There’s a dystopian Brazilian thing, name is something like SIX PERCENT

restarted FILINTA: can't reeally remember who anyone is, still intrigued by its mix of slapstick silliness and genuine nastiness

Have you tried Turkish on Duolingo yet, mark?

it is on my list but some way down :)

EASY LIVING/HELPPO ELÄMÄ (finnish): just started, three series

The PIDE were the secret police, just basically the Gestapo of the regime. Very adept at torture, just the worst scum.

The only reason the Carnation Revolution had a death toll at all was the director of the PIDE saw a crowd outside and just fired into it at random.

Very adept at torture, just the worst scum.

so this show's version is a fairly accurate portrayal

I’ve been kinda wiped out on the feel-bad organized crime shows, I stopped watching Gomorrah which is objectively well-done but the characters are such abhorrent ppl that I feel like I get the point. Got to that point w ZeroZeroZero too which looked amazing and had some great acting but it lost me by the end.

Mostly been sticking w/Engrenages, Stranger, and Entrapped.

I fucking loved Au Service de la France, but it's not on netflix anymore.

I think I am 4 seasons behind on Engranages ...

it isn't on Netflix but I am gonna use this as a catch-all for non-english language series on streaming services ... would love to hear other ilxors recommendations, reviews, etc .

I just finished watching all 7 years of A French Village (occupied France during and after WW2)-- it's really good imo and relevant to current events in terms of Occupation and tactics and repression as well as history stuff.

Features Thierry Godard and Audrey F from Engranages

also has communists and communists having meetings! And passive-aggressively calling each other Comrade

Currently watching Furies on Netflix — a dumb John Wick-esque show about a woman, "the Fury," who is in charge of enforcing the bylaws of the French underworld, murdering gangsters who step out of line in order to preserve the balance of power between the six big gangster families who run Paris, or whatever. Could just as easily have posted this in my international-violent-action-trash thread. It's only eight episodes but each one feels as long as a Bela Tarr movie.

Danish prison drama Prisoner (with Sofie Gråbøl) on BBC iPlayer is excellent.

Really enjoying Prisoner, thanks for the recommendation

Started watching Hidden Theories (portugal) and I am somewhat confused about how banks work there

as posted on the other streaming thread, I started watching the Korean ad agency drama AGENCY on Netflix, and it hits a similar sweet spot as my other recent Korean fave STRANGER while being completely different. Two episodes in and it's already extremely twisty with a couple thoroughly despicable male agency execs engaging in a Succession-type war against the female lead. She's similar to one of the two leads in Stranger (Cho Seung-woo as Si-mok) in that the trauma of her childhood has informed her superficial coldness and callousness, which leads to those around her misunderstanding and underestimating her. Absolutely soapy OTT kinda stuff, I love it so far.

Spymaster on iPlayer is familiar but not. it's another cold war spy drama set in the 70s with all the necessary retro fashions but this one is Romanian (and German and Russian and American)

(a joint Hungarian Romanian production based on the credits)

Parlement seems to be the Euro version of The Thick of It… anyone else seen it?

No, never heard of it! downloading now..

Fourth and final series of My Brilliant Friend now streaming. Loving every minute of it so far, the new actresses are great and the script is as sharp as ever.