Breaking Bad withdrawal support society

yeah, that's v otm - dean norris does a phenomenal job fleshing hank's character out, it's a shame that he hasn't found an opportunity to showcase just how good an actor he is outside breaking bad (afaik anyway)

also it was funny when he tweeted the phrase 'sex gifs' a while back

he hasn't been shot yet in my rewatch

maybe he'll escape injury this time

fingers crossed

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

(sorry 4 spoilers)

Didn't find pre-shooting Hank to be one-note at all--would echo the posts above. For me, the most recognizable character from real life. I've know a few Hanks in my life, starting with my dad, to a degree. Norris also seemed to be having more fun than anybody with his role, something that always registers with me--cf. Joanna Cassidy in Six Feet Under.

i tried rewatching this a while back, i did not enjoy it. so much of the appeal of the show for me is the fast-moving forward pace of the plot and it just wasn't as interesting to me the second time around.

we started better call saul recently, it is... different. really slow. we are almost done w/ the first season and i still feel like we're only 3-4 episodes in plotwise

Get used to it, the first season is the breeziest.

BCS s7: mike sits in a car all season, he grunts once (ep 4)

^^^stoked nevertheless, would watch and watch again

BCS s9: A thirteen hour surveillance project is shown in real time. Mike almost seems like he's going to grunt at one point but he's too busy duct taping a rake to an electrical pylon.

It occasionally cuts to five minute scenes of Jimmy and Kim very deliberately ignoring each other in various locations.

BCS >>>> BB

this is a fact

BCS >>>> BB

this is a factfad

i think BSC is better than BB also *BUT* BB is very extremely rewatchable bcz things don't all have to be the same

and looking forward to s9's pylon-rake action

otoh omg clickbad is still up and running

― Οὖτις, Monday, October 22, 2018 3:06 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Already made 3.13T tbh

lol i just caught myself carefully trying to work out how old walt is meant to be based on him repping for boz scaggs (as "better than any of your bands today") and skyler and walt jr not knowing who boz scaggs is

I watched this once, live on actual TV years ago. Started re-watching it this summer and have only the final episode left which I will watch tonight.

It's been pretty good, though it does suffer from knowing the major plot points and how it all ends. But I was surprised at how many of the sub-plots, minor characters, and details I had forgotten about and a lot of it - especially references to previous seasons - felt more coherent without 12 month gaps between seasons. That time lapse also made it easier to forget how much of a petty, manipulative asshole Walt was pretty much right from the start.

doesn't he turn 50 in the first episode

yes it was a completely needless bit of auto-brainwork while tired: once i solved it -- for some reason finding the calculation much harder than it needed to be, bcz i started at the boz scaggs end -- i realised i'd worked out that ok he's obviously much the same age i was in 2008 (=48) so there's no anachronism, and wait anyway didn't they say he's 50

I think Saul is the steadier, more thoughtful show of the two, but I don't think it has quite scaled Breaking Bad's greatest moments--which, for me, would include "Windy," Hank figuring things out via the poem, and "I fucked Ted," among others.

Saul had an advantage, I'd say, in that it had a framework from which to start. Breaking Bad had to create its universe and make it up on the go, so sometimes it gets a little erratic.

Better call Saul is better than breaking bad - I actually don’t know anyone who doesn’t think so - but there are definitely people with weird issues around the fact that Saul is a spin-off from the popular and excellent tv series breaking bad. All these people who definitely, for a fact, fucking cookiemonstered all 5 seasons of bb advising others to skip it and go straight to bcs, as though the former was trash not worth bothering with & as though familiarity with its events and characters weren’t definitely, for a fact, enriching their own experience of watching bcs. This is very bad advice! Someone in the bcs thread was saying “mike is only in this show because ppl were psyched about his character in bb” and I’m like........yes?

what is cookiemonstering?

oh you mean ate up greedily, I get it now

I also strongly prefer BCS, but I had a great conversation with a friend recently about how much of a moral distance there is between Jimmy and Saul, and yeah you can't have those kinds of insights if you just dispense with BB (apologies if that has been discussed to death on the BCS thread which I ignore since I'm a season behind)

a thing that doesn't rerun so strongly the second time through is how much fun it was watching bryan cranston playing serious dark -- this pass we just know he can

does jesse ever pop up in bcs? I'm still on s1

no

what else do you want to know about what happens in the next four years before you watch it

s9, customer at the cinnabon

definitely down for 39-year-old Aaron Paul to turn up regularly playing a teenager meanwhile though

:0 :D
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DPGjjCBcAg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHnemDkHvgA

can i really be the only person watching LA REINA DEL SUR?

i mean i assume this is not a new thing in the telenovela format but i had quite forgotten i'd liked the first when i fell for the second

Getting away from the rubric of this thread here, but I feel like the season finale of BCS went a long way towards justifying Mike's presence beyond 'because Mike is cool and we love him and want to see more of him'. By which I mean the thing where we get to see the two characters simultaneously erupt from their BCS cocoons and metamorphose into their BB selves (one giddily, one super reluctantly). Definitely put a neat cap on what had seemed like increasingly-disparate and unrelated journeys.

it's also been extremely realistic that Jimmy and Mike went a year or two without interacting, after the entanglements in earlier seasons.

I was definitely in the BCS > BB camp until this last season, now I’m not sure, but I might just be forgetting the older BCS seasons. 16 months or whatever between seasons will do that though

saul goodman klaxon

just (re)watched thru to end of s2 -- forgot how utterly fkn grisly the final scene is emotionally

(it isn't even hate or rage, it's -- i don't know what it is, him grasping he has no need to reign anything in? it's "letting die" not "killing" but it's the door he's deciding to let swing open -- first panic, then indecision, then cowardice, then a mix of what-if! and self pity and i think some actual sadness (tho not directed at jane at all or jesse except in his strange twisted-dad way) and then back to that pitiless burn-it-down thing that's always just under his surface

The conversation in the bar between Walter and Jane's father, and then the way they connected her father's breakdown to the rest of the story, were two of the highlights of the entire run for me.

https://variety.com/2018/tv/news/breaking-bad-movie-in-the-works-1203021681/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

Twitter has the impression that this is true so good news

actually e12 is not the end of s2, there's a 13th ep in which we meet MIKE for the first time (interestingly his voice is not quite as rumbly-deep on first encounter)

He was much younger then than his later younger self

I remember when bcs started I was pretty shocked that mike had liver spots & every single character he encountered conspicuously referred to him as a cantankerous old “geezer”

I really didn’t remember him seeming *that* old in breaking bad. Now I worry that he’ll croak before they finish bcs

the breaking bad movie had better be a badger and skinny pete adventure, that’s all i’m saying

(it isn't even hate or rage, it's -- i don't know what it is, him grasping he has no need to reign anything in? it's "letting die" not "killing" but it's the door he's deciding to let swing open -- first panic, then indecision, then cowardice, then a mix of what-if! and self pity and i think some actual sadness (tho not directed at jane at all or jesse except in his strange twisted-dad way) and then back to that pitiless burn-it-down thing that's always just under his surface

kinda wonder how many actors out there could've pulled this off. much less dudes primarily known for sitcoms.

we just got to the end of S2, not sure how I feel about the big "reveal" at the end because clearly those 'flash forward' scenes lead you somewhere else and having this big deus ex machina thing explain it feels really manipulative. though you kinda figure it out, at some point you realize there's only 5-6 minutes left, one really big plot point coming, and a lot of focus on this air traffic controller...

tbh comedy actors turning in good work in serious roles is -- if not quite a cliche -- certainly not that unusual; i think many comic actors do actually have a wider, more thoughtful range than many so-called "serious" actors (who'd be terrible at comedy), but typecasting casts a harsh shadow. still, i'd never paid much attention to cranston even when watching and enjoying MitM

i was expecting it this time obviously but first time through i was quite bothered by the aircrash. it seemed a bit too (in the lol modern young people's sense as well it's proper sense) "random" -- a surreal or inexplicable alienation effect. except it isn't really surreal or inexplicable, and it has a clear structural role. it's a highly over-visible and maybe somewhat over-determined shorthand for collateral damage -- and NOT just crashing entirely in from beyond the story and its concerns, despite rogueishly suggesting that's exactly what it is. it's play-acting at being a comedic an upping of the ante in the ghoulishness stakes ("have we gone too far this time?"). but the whole of s2 is about pulling back from right in the heart of walt's rage and fear (per s1, where we get drawn into seeing his side quite sympathetically despite his extremely self-centred drives), to the damage spreading out from him, that he's actually causing, that his decisions are causing, by making some things happen, by not stopping others. not so much his immediately family yet, even including jesse as his "family", but a step or two beyond them -- and suddenly that's a big societal tremor and not cartoon domestic knockabout any longer. so it's clever -- and it does kind of work -- but it's kind of bullshit at the same, and mainly saved by arty effects (burnt plush bunny in a pool etc)

I kinda wonder how it would've come off without the flash-forwards, which clearly imply that something happened to Walt's daughter and that two people he knew were dead in his driveway. It's almost soap opera-ish, where they say "Tune in Next Week..." and preview a scene from the next episode where a character walks in on his wife cheating on him, only to have that scene actually be some sort of dream, or whatever

which is unfortunate, because otherwise I think it would've been a really awesome ending, something unexpected and extreme that's also highly symbolic