What's good on Amazon Prime Video

Tokyo Girl 東京女子医大 is a better than average Japanese drama tracking the life of a girl from Akita who comes to work in Tokyo. It’s a pretty realistic portrayal of how shittily Japan treats career oriented women and it’s well worth as watch.

big night and bully, 2 of my fav movies, are on there iirc

The Terror

Fleabag s2 is great, go watch that

I like The Tick and Man In The High Castle — way behind on both but I am enjoying them

I’ll tell you what ISNT good on amazon prime video, it’s when you watch an old movie on there only to find that they’ve uploaded some kind of “tv cut” that’s been cut to shit instead of the full movie

Happened to me more than once and it’s v annoying

yes i hate that!

also they aren’t adding as many recent movie releases any more. :(

but they still have a reliably good library of Masterpiece Theater stuff & English detective/police procedurals

i really liked the patriot as well. it's not a prime original but recently, i've been watching baywatch with some friends. it's fascinating.

I absolutely love Red Oaks

Let The Corpses Tan, the latest film from Bruno & Helene (best known for The Strange Colour of your Body's Tears), is somewhat inexplicably free. There's also a giant trove of music docs, some of which (like the Pentagram or Stooges or Mudhoney ones) had actual proper releases and some of us (well, me) paid hard cash for.

I've found the way to discover the stuff you want to watch is to use the store and not the app.

all 1,225 episodes of Dark Shadows are free

https://darkshadowseveryday.com/episode-guide/

Thanks for the tip - I was thinking about buying Let The Corpses Tan on Blu-Ray from Kino Lorber, but I doubt I'd watch it twice, so I'll just check it out on Prime.

Oh yeah Red Oaks was really good. I stopped High Man at the end of the first season because it just made me mad.

Gortimer Gibbons is excellent if you're looking for something to watch with your kids.

Vikings and Black Sails are both trashy but fun.

And Halt & Catch Fire is superb.

I watched all of Fleabag this week and it was excellent!

fleabag is good.

i have a bunch of music docs bookmarked. there’s one on freestyle i’m saving for a rainy day. also chappelle’s block party is on there

The two seasons of Fleabag are perfect, one of my favorite of all time.

oh yes Red Oaks is great

Bosch is their comfort food show and it’s a pretty basic program but it’s pretty dope as an L.A. cop show with a veneer of The Wire-style politicking and careerism. Superb cast, Welliver owns but really good work from Jamie Hector, Paul Calderón, Lance Reddick, etc. there are some not-good guest turns but it’s a cop show, there’s always gonna be some corniness. S1 is mostly just “pretty good” but it really gets going from there.

Yah Bosch is great (also has its own thread)

Gotta check out red oaks

I can't get into Bosch, but I've always enjoyed the books

Sneaky Pete is far from perfect but a lot of fun, and has a bunch of great performances. There's a third season just out with a new showrunner instead of Graham Yost, which is a bummer, as the Justified-y vibe was part of the appeal.

HACF is an all-time great show, loved it so much, would watch again.

I only made it 2 1/2 episodes into Sneaky Pete season 3, and I didn't realize they'd changed showrunners, but that may explain why I hated it. And it bums me out not to watch this one, given that it includes Ricky Jay's final performance, but it was really bad when I bailed out. They introduced a new character that's clearly intended to be a sexy and charming femme fatale, and I just wanted Pete to shove her into traffic.

I love watching Jamie Hector in Bosch -- he must like golf in real life

oh and the most recent season has Opie from Sons of Anarchy in it ... and his character dresses like Bobby from Sons of Anarchy ...

Ha yeah pretty cool character

i see "Bobby" at my local TJ's all the damn time. he dresses like...himself on Sons of Anarchy.

Jamie Hector is great on Bosch, and so likable. basically the anti-Marlo Stanfield.

They cancelled the Tick. :(

Vikings is great

Didn’t even realize the tick returned til I saw the cancellation news—love that dam show and looking forward to whenever they inevitably give it another go

they cancelled it? it just got a ton of press about returning. too bad, never actually watched it

thanks for the music docs tip - had never struck me to look before, but I am now spending a pleasant Sunday evening with TAD.

All of Joanna Hogg's films are available.

I can't get into Bosch, but I've always enjoyed the books

I've read the first handful of books (reaction: these are not great but they are v efficient & I will probably read most of them) and watched the first episode, was underwhelmed

ppl said it got really good later so I watched the last few of S3

was underwhelmed

tbf you are not easily whelmed

The efficiency is kind of the key to their greatness, plus the way the books are stacked with these little procedural mini-mysteries that get described and then solved every few pages. The series’ lack of mystery focus - it seems more like an ensemble cop show from the few episodes I’ve seen - probably contributes to my lack of whelm (plus I don’t like the lead, in this role anyway).

Gonna try again for the angels flight series though, as that’s my favourite of the books.

Sneaky Pete season 3 is pretty skipable, unfortunately

Bosch is usually best mid-season? I may be off in my remembering but the general formula is that each season has a more action-based plot in parallel with a slow-burn or multi-season plot element and the more active case gets the majority of the time mid-season followed by a wrap-up and return to the slow-burn element to tie up both threads in the last few.

i've only watched the first 3 seasons but i thought it was pretty interesting insofar as the mysteries weren't explained very easily and there were at least four of them happening at once (with a couple converging into one). And I always like a good Arnold Vosloo role.

It's not clear whether this thread is for movies or just original series/TV. There really needs to be a place to share movie discoveries, because Prime has so damn many (something like 5x Netflix), with so much variety, yet the browsing interface is terrible. If Amazon had applied the same techniques to enabling people to find products they could order online, Bezos would still be aspiring to put boutique bookstores out of business.

Anyhow, thanks for 'Let The Corpses Tan'. A little gorier than I usually like, but all the more riveting for it. Startled to recognize a no longer alabaster Elina Lowensohn, 25 years after 'Amateur'.

Some 2018 movies I've recently come across. Haven't watched them all yet:

Ghostbox Cowboy
Wobble Palace
Milford Graves Full Mantis
Never Goin' Back
Guys Reading Poems

Films of note from 18/19 on US Prime; sorry if some of these are repeats:

Hereditary
Zama
The Road Movie
Eighth Grade
Leave No Trace
The Death of Stalin
Border
A Quiet Place
First Reformed
You Were Never Really Here
Generation Wealth
Unsane
The Great Buddha+
A Prayer Before Dawn
Lots of Kids, A Monkey and A Castle
Western
John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection
Let the Corpses Tan
Madeline’s Madeline
Cold War
Loveless
A Fantastic Woman
Suspiria

^Good list. Also of note, Lean on Pete. However, it looks like Border, Death of Stalin and Loveless are only viewable on Prime for an extra charge.

"Ghostbox Cowboy"

this was made by friends of mine! well written and directed by my friend's husband who I don't know as well as her (she is a producer on it). .... still haven't watched it shamefully

Anyone seen 'Leave No Trace'? As someone who lived off the grid for a while and found it immensely satisfying if terrifyingly difficult, I'm wondering whether I'll like it or want to kill it.

it’s really really good. *highly* recommend.

it is very judgement-free imo.

yes agree

For a PG movie it's beautiful and very very subtle and sophisticated for a film you can watch with your (slightly older) kid.

Border, Death of Stalin and Loveless WERE on there! Go figure.

Leave No Trace is excellent; one of the best films of last year imo.

I really loved the way Madeline’s Madeline was filmed, with all of the subjective points of view and blurred displaced images, and the ending was so unexpectedly strange and euphoric

Given that it's by the Walking Dead people, I worry that they'll have to shoehorn a bunch of awful gore every episode. If that is not the case, I'd love to know, since I was getting into it until that scene.

― DJI, Wednesday, April 21, 2021

5 eps in there are a couple of winces here and there but only one other scene like the one you're thinking of, and again in that one a certain kind of point is being made. it's ugly but not gratuitous.

They've uploaded all 75 episodes of Jim Nabors' late '70s talk show and IT'S A VIBE...

Good news

Twitter: Announce Season 2, you cowards
InvincibleHQ: How about Seasons 2 AND 3?!?!?!? pic.twitter.com/lWCSGbNTka

— INVINCIBLE (@InvincibleHQ) April 29, 2021

people who take issue with the violence will uh not be happy with that finale

I do like the show but it kind of grew off me over the course of the season, mostly small writing problems adding up

chief among them:

I definitely see the appeal of a psychologically somewhat "realistic" superhero show where a big ol' chunk of the point is that in any sort of "real world" scenario, having godlike powers while being surrounded by fragile meatsacks called "people" would actually be a horrifying responsibility. that's a fine starting point to work from. so to then have our protagonist bounce back (physically and at least to some extent psychologically) within a couple weeks after his own father beats him nearly to death and murders "incalculable" numbers of people, including literally using Invincible's body as a battering ram to turn an entire subway car of people into gore, kind of makes it seem like Kirkman and co. have the same level of respect for human life that Omni-Man does.

but yeah I mostly came away from it wishing it was actually a new season of venture bros, which actually pulled off the "psychological quasi realism in a comic-book/cartoon/pulp world" without all the casual genocide

Consequence-free violence for bloodlusting fans is the Kirkman motif. That and bad dialog

yeah it's just jarring because it does feel like some people involved are trying to pull it in a less hateful direction and it ends up in a weird tonal place

I watched the new Dave Grohl van touring documentary 'What Drives Us' this morning on Prime.

It's not really about van touring, most of that is just glossed over. It's mostly famous rock stars (some of whom have never toured in a van!) talking about themselves and how much they enjoy playing live. They did interview some younger bands (Starcrawler, Radkey), but they get very little screen time. Dave Grohl made himself the star of the documentary, so there is plenty of Foo Fighters content. I enjoyed it, but if you're looking for a van-touring documentary, the one that was recently posted in the youtube documentary thread is a much better one.

Vannist critique

Simon OTM - I haven’t watched the finale yet but initial pleasure has dwindled

I'm wondering - is Prime's original content (not counting stuff actually intended for families/children) deliberately, notably edgier than Netflix's? (Disney+ is a foregone conclusion.) I thought it was just the Rogen/Goldberg joints but reading about the lowlights of Them has made me wonder if it's not a deliberate strategy.

The most violent Netflix original I can recall was Daredevil and it seems tame compared to the most gruesome stuff in these series.

I haven't thought about that before, but it does make sense

The Boys is ott for sure.

Though it's animated, parts of Invincible are actually worse.

Meanwhile Netflix's most popular(?) original superhero thing, Umbrella Academy, is family fare by comparison. (Based on s1, anyway.)

Invincible spoilers:

I did not read the finale as "welp everything's okay now" in any way, shape, or form. I read it as Mark is still deeply wounded by his father's betrayal and is rededicating himself to humanity as a result. I also read it as him seeing the galactic coalition as an opportunity to stop intergalactic Viltrumite expansion once and for all, so others won't go through the same trauma he and Debbie went through. A lot of the epilogue to that fight was explicit rejection of his father and his father's values; it doesn't make sense to me to read it as if Mark has "bounced back" or to parse the events as creator contempt for humanity. If anything, the entire series was about how traditional superhero stories are casualty-riddled bullshit and Atom Eve is the only person whose heroic endeavors seem to make any sort of lasting positive impact.

I know they were going for that but (imo) the writing and characterization doesn't back it up credibly.

I mostly enjoyed the "baddie of the week" elements - I liked the way they went for heavy serialization while remembering to tell discrete stories. So many series do nothing to take advantage of the episode as a discrete storytelling unit.

sometimes when I watch shows on streaming that were on network/basic cable, I think that commercials in a way were a nice way of forcing writers to make each episode have a good 3/4 "chapter" structure

that's generous. half the time it feels like they use the commercial break to expositionally recap what you just watched

I only just managed to get to the end of the first episode of Them, with no intention of going back, and we all know what my standards are like for watching things that aren't any good.

Didn't realize Invincible was being released weekly so only discovered tonight that episode 6 wasn't the finale.

Still awaiting Undone Season two... apparently it's coming, but nobody seems to know when.

Oh yeah! That was good.

odenkirk brought it up in some of the press for nobody, he seems hyped about it

I am also hyped though the first season seemed like it ended at a natural conclusion

rember when the tick and invincible had a crossover and they fought red jelly people just so they could do a gory invincible fight pic.twitter.com/HLaqm3wftS

— Tredlocity (@tredlocity) May 6, 2021

cute!

ha! had no idea that happened

Just mentioned this on the other streaming thread...

Watched Michael B. Jordan's Tom Clancy's John Kelly Clark Is...Without Remorse on Amazon Prime. It's pretty good, but there are some absurd aspects. In the opening scene, Jordan and his top secret Navy SEAL kill squad emerge in full scuba gear from a swimming pool in the middle of a building in downtown Bombed-Out Middle East-burg, kill a bunch of anono-goons and then as they're walking toward the next stage of their journey, not only is all the scuba gear gone but they're not even wet! Also, how did they get into the pool in the first place? After that, though, it's pretty solid. Jodie Turner-Smith from Queen & Slim is Jordan's running partner throughout, and she's excellent in both the dramatic and the ass-kicking scenes. The actor playing the villain is...a surprising choice, at least he was to me.

It’s a Taylor Sheridan-written, Stefano Sollima-directed venture, much like the Sicario sequel. I think it works better than that movie, and is infinitely more coherent than the second season of Amazon’s Jack Ryan show. It’s just kind of blah.

I still can't understand why ZeroZeroZero isn't more popular

The first episode didn't really grip me; should I keep going?

Yes

So many shows about drug kingpins and dead girls.

the gleeson bros comedy is just the right amount of un-engaging to be a comfortable doing-chores-while-not-really-watching show.
what other shows are like that?

The first episode didn't really grip me; should I keep going?

Probably not then as imo it went downhill after the first few episodes

1st episode's glamorous violence and sadism didn't do anything for me tbh

Final season of Bosch has dropped today

watched 3 eps last night