What's good on Amazon Prime Video

I did a deep dive down the "viewers who liked x may like y" hole and discovered Amazon has a zillion B-westerns, I assume in public domain and usually in terrible condition -- Roy Rogers, Tom Mix, Hoot Gibson, Ken Maynard, Tex Ritter, that crowd. I watched a couple and they're in the "so bad they're kind of entertaining" category.

its not on amazon prime nor was it created by amazon. but i am currently watching it by other means and it's great.

huh weird right I guess it was AMC? For some reason Amazon was where I got it. my bad.

In regards to this and the Netflix thread, I would absolutely like to know about good films or TV shows that are on the platform regardless of whether they are original content or not. There are lots of great movies on both that you'll only ever find if you do a lot of digging.

If you put any stock in IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes ratings, one of the tools at justwatch.com lets you only show films with at least ___ IMDB score or ___% on RT. It's a starting point anyway.

xp it's compounded by the fact we're an international community, or at least continually remind each other of that fact, and the licensing across services means it's total guesswork as to what is available on each service unless it's content that service originated

I'd be good with a general purpose "now streaming" movies thread with the caveat that streaming might just mean "available for home release"

Has this been posted yet? It allows you to search Prime Movies & TV by new or popular or random etc.

https://instantwatcher.com/a

its not on amazon prime nor was it created by amazon. but i am currently watching it by other means and it's great.

huh weird right I guess it was AMC? For some reason Amazon was where I got it. my bad.

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, May 28, 2019 10:24 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

no prob. it may have been available at some point on there. which is kinda the problem with talking itt about content merely hosted by amazon, it may come and go.

I love the idea of a general 'movies/tv now streaming on...' recommendations thread.

Terror is on Hulu i believe.

I do this for my "now available" hunting; allows you to sort by service which is a great help:
https://www.justwatch.com/us/new

Brownie, I first learned about instantwatcher several years ago somewhere on ilx. I use both it and justwatch, which covers virtually all streaming services. IW to keep up with newly added titles and JW to find out what service, if any, carries a particular movie. They're both great for filtered searches.

It really is a problem keeping track of what comes and goes from Prime and Netflix. Especially on Prime, movies can disappear for a few weeks then come back again. And often a bunch of movies will leave one service and immediately show up on the other, or on Hulu, Starz, etc. Apparently, due to licensing deals changing hands.

I will now be watching The Terror, having learned Jared Harris is in it. Still one of the 4 shows available on Amazon Prime in Australia.

Four more 2018 films of note on Prime not mentioned above:

Thunder Road
Colette
Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot
Beautiful Boy

I watched the first two last night. Thunder Road is not to be missed. Feels at times like humiliating comedy monologues stitched onto a melodrama, but there's more to it. Colette was a lot better than I expected. Keira Knightley is fantastic, and the story never hardly lapses into self-congratulatory plays for relevance. It probably helps that I didn't know anything about Colette's early life.

I'm hesitant to get to the other two yet.

Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot isn't spectacular, but it's a nice story and jonah hill is excellent, like truly really great.

yea i really enjoyed that 1 also, to my surprise

beautiful boy is watchable but not v good imo

I made it about 5 minutes into Historical Roasts or whatever before I cringed out.

Agree that Colette was pretty good. None of the others really interest me.

Terror has indeed just shown up on US Hulu. I watched the first episode last night but may wait a couple of weeks to resume - I can only take about one hour a week of Jared Harris, and Chernobyl's still going.

I made it about 5 minutes into Historical Roasts or whatever before I cringed out.

― Leaghaidh am brón an t-anam bochd (dowd), Friday, May 31, 2019 12:00 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

for the netflix thread?

Oh, sorry! Got mixed up.

Yes, I already own the DVD, but I'm still excited to see Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise on here.

Just added: Connie Plank – The Potential of Noise. Documentary about the krautrock producer made by his son. It's good, for the most part.

I noticed there's a load of the usually pretty good Classic Albums documentaries on Prime. Not sure if they're all there but there's lots

i watched a documentary the other night about the banana and American imperialism in Latin America. Pretty decent intro, though I'd really like to see something more in depth that isn't some smug Michael Moore or whoever-type expose.

Watched the first episode of GOOD OMENS tonight and holy fuck was it bad. My tolerance for whimsy is low at the best of times, and this was about as Not For Me as it's possible for a thing to be, and that was before Queen showed up on the soundtrack. I don't really blame Neil Gaiman, though, 'cause I liked American Gods (book, not show), and while I've never read anything by Terry Pratchett, the Wikipedia plot summary of one of his novels (the first in a 40-book series, for fuck's sake) made me want to tear my eyes out.

The trailer and even just the thumbnail looked so bad I couldn’t even bother giving the pilot a few minutes

i quite like it

but the special effects are so unforgivably terrible ... ie vfx in s1 eccelstone new-Who level crappy — and whatever the fuck they did to Tennant’s lizardy demon eyes (contacts or digital i cant quite tell ) looks hideous.

It's contacts in every shot, even when he's wearing sunglasses, but enhanced with cgi in the scenes where it looks aggressively stupid

that was before Queen showed up on the soundtrack

This is a reference to a very good running joke in the book, that has been left out of the series altogether.

oh man this is making me sad as I was super looking forward to this, although i think the book is way overrated.

sic what did you think of it? overall?

Watched the first episode of GOOD OMENS tonight and holy fuck was it bad. My tolerance for whimsy is low at the best of times, and this was about as Not For Me as it's possible for a thing to be, and that was before Queen showed up on the soundtrack. I don't really blame Neil Gaiman, though, 'cause I liked American Gods (book, not show), and while I've never read anything by Terry Pratchett, the Wikipedia plot summary of one of his novels (the first in a 40-book series, for fuck's sake) made me want to tear my eyes out.

Your objections make sense in that, as I understand it, due to Pratchett's passing they wanted to incorporate as many of the elements that he brought to the novel as possible.

(I haven't watched it and probably won't tbh)

A someone who read the book as a teenager I didn’t dislike it but it wasn’t great either. It’s a bit heavy handed and too faithful as the book to the extent that Frances McDermont/God is explaining jokes that only really work written down. They also don’t really do much to build the characters of the ‘Them’. The book portrays them as a sort of a just William/Famous Five gang of kids living in an sentimental old world England that was already long gone in 1990, but conjoined up by Damian’s imagination field by these books . They almost seem incidental to the story. By contrast a lot of the rest of the series could do with some heavy editing. Too faithful to the book.

I don’t think we’ve talked about the Marvelous Mrs Maisel which is good fun.

(This Sunday in Melbourne was great weather for binge watching TV)

Maisel talk moved to the Maisel thread in January 2018

sic what did you think of it? overall?

it's not good but it's watchable. definitely wouldn't recommend it to anyone who hasn't read the book. I liked the 3rd episode best, which was almost entirely new material, and with Sheen and Tennant throughout.

Adam and his pals (who are 100% William and the Outlaws, with the serial numbers faintly liquid-papered over, in the book) are so minimal a presence in the series that I wondered if they got cut down drastically because the boys or just Adam turned out to be such bad / not grasping the (very had to grasp) tone of the production. Weren't they basically the second group of protagonists in the prose version?

Everyone who isn't Crowley and Aziraphale gets short shrift tbf - not only have Newt and Anathema only met each other about 40 seconds before they bone, we've not had much longer to get to know either of them. McKean has lost his ability at British accents since Spinal Tap, even with a Scottish director, and is startlingly uncompelling as the second-most-seen character so soon after he pinned your eyes and emotions in Better Call Saul. Miranda Richardson is kinda wasted, but also doesn't have any of the earthiness of the book's character: it feels like she is very relievedly slipping into chastity at the end, rather than diverting Shadwell into appreciating pleasures of the flesh.

Frances McDormand's narration is so flat that one imagines they'd proudly announced the casting before she recorded, and couldn't go back. It's not just that she's reading or elucidating stuff from the book, it's that either she doesn't seem to get the jokes enough to play them deadpan, or the visuals are so frenetically busy underneath her that it undermines her casual delivery from what might otherwise play as deadpan.

Similar objections to sic esp re: Frances McDormand's narration. Pacing was all over the place - it felt like they were just rushing through the plot points of the book.

I did like the kids though - thought the parts where Adam comes into his powers were better here than they were in the book. It's been a while since I read it but iirc Adam just weirds his friends out a bit before he comes round. Here he actually gets to be a bit more terrifying.

Sheen and Tennant were great, everyone else was underutilised/miscast. And as with all things Gaiman, the whole thing was all just entirely too pleased with itself.

Young teen me is surprised no one has green-lit that Piers Anthony immortality series yet.

I watched the first ep, and it was much better than I expected. Will watch the rest.

while I've never read anything by Terry Pratchett, the Wikipedia plot summary of one of his novels (the first in a 40-book series, for fuck's sake) made me want to tear my eyes out.

lol this is pretty much my experience except swap out Wikipedia summary for having someone describe the novel to me at length while I nod politely and desperately look for an exit (this has happened to me multiple times in my life with different people, so apparently pratchett fans are the type of people who do this) (I did try to read something by him once, it was bad)

Yeah the trailer is terrible and it definitely looks awful and cheap !

It was okay. Tennant was great, Sheen was good (I probably would have thought he was great if his portrayal had matched the mental image I had from the book, which was a significantly older character), I kind of liked the Horsemen.

Jon Hamm was also pretty funny but that's not a surprise.

Yeah I thought it was ok. Tennant, Sheen and Hamm were all good. Whitehall ok. Any others with big parts pretty poor esp McKean who was dreadful.

The first episode, or even just the opening sequences were nearly enough to put me off totally - the stench of cod Douglas Adams was overwhelming and threatened to come back every time the Frances McDormand v/o struck up.

Has anyone watched "Higher Power"? Looks like a b-grade alt-superhuman movie, very vaguely like "Rupture", in that putting someone through stress unlocks latent ability. Not having Amazon Prime, if someone rates it average or better, I'd track it down elsewhere. Am thinking Google Play for "Forest of Lost Souls", so would look for "Higher Power" there, also.

^"Forest of Lost Souls" is great. It's on both Prime and Hulu.

Searching at justwatch.com, I see that "Higher Power" is on Hulu but would cost $4.99 for members to watch on Prime. Not my thing anyway.

Hulu would be your best deal to see both films. The $5.99/month plan works great for watching just movies. That's less than Google Play for just the two, and Hulu's ads only interrupt their TV shows/series.

Thanks for the input! Been planning on dropping HBO, which - aside from GoT, John Oliver, and the periodic special or movie - hasn't been an excellent value for the money.

So could replace it with Hulu, meant to say.

I've been watching Long Strange Trip, the Amazon original Dead documentary. It's definitely a cut above the standard issue streaming doc-in-a-box and is done in a style that suits is subject matter very well.

Any others with big parts pretty poor esp McKean who was dreadful.

About a minute into his first appearance, I said to myself "McKean was cast and directed to give this ridiculous performance because Shadwell is not supposed to come across as a credible human being" and then he stopped bothering me.

xp to alpaca: the main story element of 'this week tonight' is on their youtube channel every week fwiw

Good Omens is not as bad as I expected but I feel like actors other than Sheen and Tennant would have made it better.

It just occurred to me that the Queen gag was the one thing from the book that they DIDN'T signpost and repeat three times to make sure everyone watching got it

thanks for the post about the 'classic albums' series being on here. got those queued up for background viewing during work .