What's good on Amazon Prime Video

Amazon seem to be promoting the shit out of The Boys (similar to Good Omens) whereas Too Old To Die Young got absolutely zero coverage

Forever isn't getting a S2. That's fine. I think they told enough of the story

Yeah I'm OK with that - unless maybe they wanted to do something in the same universe and same rules with different characters that'd work for me.

the best episode of forever was the standalone one imo. i don't think it "works' as a piece of television without a second season, though on the other hand i don't think a second season would have necessarily have been great. i also dislike fred armisen

I'm on episode 4 or 5 of "The Boys," and man, it gets pretty dark. Sometimes funny, often OTT, sometimes smart. I also think the soundtrack so far (everything from the Damned to Bill Withers) is pretty sharp, and the cast is strong across the board, Urban's accent aside. fwiw, the most "all-American" of the characters is played by another Kiwi.

having read an issue of the comic - which was just absolutely hateful - i can never watch that.

i see that's been covered numerous times

Yeah, I haven't read the cover, but I don't feel I've come across anything hateful yet. Ugly, yeah, but the scenario it introduces seems relatively plausible to me.

Read the comic, I meant.

I get the impression in that case the show is nothing like the comic if that helps because ILX is the only place canning it (and most people doing so haven't seen the show just read the books), it is getting good reviews everywhere I've read and I really quite enjoyed it. Aside from the bit I mentioned earlier there is nothing else really disgusting. Theyre all horrible awful people sure but thats the point of the story. I suspect it was verrrrrry Ennis-sanitised if that alleviates anyone's wary disgust on it.

do they keep the bit where hughie beats the fuck out of one of the heroes and then finds a gerbil wrapped in duct tape shoved up his ass and then befriends it as a mascot?
i'm just wondering what horrible shit they kept and what horrible shit they tossed and "woman grinds man's head to pulp between her legs" as a warning label sounds like it's got the level of fidelity i expected.

...that is getting both versions of the homophobic gerbil meme wrong at the same damn time

SFW, so for reference:
http://i.imgur.com/ULe8xcP.png

guilty lol at “the poor wee man”

There's some dark, gruesome stuff in it, but it handles it pretty well, in that it rarely seems ... I dunno, mean-spirited, if that makes any sense. The tone of the violence is very RoboCop, and the targets of the satire so far seem to be primarily celebrity worship, corporations and religious fundamentalists. If it takes an infant chopping a person in two with laser eyes to get there ... Anyway, again, I think the cast and acting are pretty solid, which is key to its success.

maybe I'm just noticing this more because I've been writing more actively than usual but holy cow is the Boys pilot just stunningly lazy and lame throughout, like Hughie and Annie having a meet-cute because....they share a bench? that was the best they could come up with?

Forever didn't seem like it could even have a second season, I'd assumed it was a one and done thing. I really liked it.

a lot of things were left unexplained which i don't think the show would have ultimately done. there would have been some justification for why the afterlife was like it was, and why the two of them ended up together while everyone else was there alone etc.

I didn't want that kind of resolution from it myself, thought it was great overall. I don't really like Armisen but it made the best use of his limited range. I do love Maya Rudolph tho.

eh, sometimes it's good to have mystery and not beat shit into the ground

urrrrgh.

ilxors in being obtuse shocker.

alan yang wanted a second season/wasn't done with the show. i don't need to google "alan yang forever season 2" to find that out but now having done that it's corroborated.

this wasn't a show being mysterious for no reason, it was not an oblique show, it was a show that hadn't gotten to the stage of explaining things.

huh, weird! cuz it worked p well as the latter imo

er as an oblique show

I finished Too Old To Die Young, which for all its promotion may as well have not even existed. I’m still marinating a bit on its themes but as a show that is at least partially devoted to the fascism of the police and features one character whose purpose seems to be visiting unholy vengeance upon men who hurt women, i appreciated it. It was extremely slow in a way that might try the patience of some (I do think the pace was a legitimate artistic choice and it didn’t bother me) and it almost literally lost the plot at the end but it had some incredible moments and I’m amazed that Amazon went anywhere near it. It was very on the nose but also just refreshing in that sense, and another legitimate choice.

I watched the first 4 eps of that on the train and I do actually want to finish it if only to see how often it does things like having a roomful of detectives chant "f-a-s-c-ism!"

SFW, so for reference:

ugh, how on earth did a comic with such disgusting gradients and hideous lettering/balloons manage to run for 80 issues or w/e

i found the boys entertaining but trashy - it barely resembles the storyline from the comic (tho shares similar characters and the general idea of an anti-superhero group disciplining poorly behaved superheroes is shared) and i think in plotting department it is significantly better. still gratuitously titillating tho.

xps I wonder if there's a story that will come to light in future about TOTDY as Amazon's zero promotion stance seems odd seeing as how it reviewed well at Cannes and was like, 13 hours long and looked stunning so must have cost a fair whack. When it was released it didn't show up anywhere on the numerous categories they have on the home page and you had to manually search for it. Think the only trailer for it was self released by NWR too.

you'd imagine it would work well as a bit of prestige for Amazon, too. I recognize that any show being touted as "groundbreaking" needs to prove it, and yet i think it really did some interesting shit. i'm not really a Refn apologist per se but this was the type of programming i would like to see more of on streaming, which should have more room for such experimentation.

I suspect the content was too much for the corporate suits. I mean the extreme anti-cop stuff and the sexual content, i can see some cowards in the board room insisting that they completely ignore its existence. I'm sure they were perfectly cool w/the violence.

The Chuck Schuldiner bio Death By Metal is on Amazon and it's excellent.

Punk documentary DOA is on Prime

I wonder if there's a story that will come to light in future about TOTDY as Amazon's zero promotion stance seems odd seeing as how it reviewed well at Cannes and was like, 13 hours long and looked stunning so must have cost a fair whack.

this is Amazon we're talking about. for them, 50 million dollars or whatever is a drop in the ocean.

They have a seven billion dollar production budget.

The Chuck Schuldiner bio Death By Metal is on Amazon and it's excellent.

― BlackIronPrison, Friday, August 2, 2019 3:43 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

goddammit i meant to watch this before i canceled prime

fuck amazon btw

Read that as Chuck Schumer at first, really need to detoxify my politics brain

Just finished The Boys last night, really enjoyed it, read the Wikipedia summaries to see how far it deviated from the comic book, reaffirmed that I will never, ever, ever, EVER read a Garth Ennis book

I was just reading some of the plot threads and going "... but WHY"

The show at least attempted to use most of the hideous violence to support the story rather than to just be gross. Robin's death is legitimately shocking and horrifying but felt arbitrary due to the callousness of the world rather than the callousness of the storytelling, if that makes sense. The cast is also fantastic.

The bit with them cutting up people with baby eye-lasers was hilarious. Very Lazer-Cats.

this is Amazon we're talking about. for them, 50 million dollars or whatever is a drop in the ocean.

― Simon H., 3. august 2019 06:42 (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

If it cost this much it would be a lot more per hour than Refns latest films. He gets a lot out of a little. Which just underlines your point :)

i think episodes 5 & 8 were very much peak Refn. i *almost* want to call 5 a masterpiece. it really goes some places.

Just finished "The Boys," and again, just to get it out of the way, don't know anything about the comic or Garth Ennis or whatever. But I thought the show was excellent and full of good ideas and performances, wouldn't change a thing. Glad it's getting a second season. And honestly think (name excised just in case) is one of the scarier crazy TV villains I've seen in a while, someone regular folks and other superheroes might legit fear.

If it cost this much it would be a lot more per hour than Refns latest films. He gets a lot out of a little.

Yeah, the budget for the whole thing was probably closer to 10-15 or less I suppose. Not too many actors and only a couple of recognizable ones, no huge setpieces, etc

I took the particular song playing during the final scene in The Boys as a bit of a spoiler of the "cliffhanger."

I didn't even notice, but I loved most of the song choices.

Oh, "Sleepwalk"? I dunno. I do love that they used iirc the Rachid Taha version of Rock the Casbah.

i've been binging Patriot, and i can see why other people might find it annoying or shallow, but simultaneously i love it so much. i think it made me laugh harder than anything else i've watched this past year. i'm early in season 2 now and i can't tell if it's not quite as good or maybe i just overdid it with the pace i watched s1.

i finished the 2nd season a couple weeks back. it's hilarious but oh so weird. "cool"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iPf_T7OYdo

"it IS cool"

basically i lose it anytime anyone on the show spouts a long stream of technical gibberish

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwTGl9fqvP0

if that were the content of the whole show for like an hour, i would reup that amazon prime now

I was just reading an AVClub feature Jimmi Simpson couldn't stop talking about The Patriot (which he's on?).

9. Who is the most underrated person in your industry right now?

JS: Underrated is a little too specific. I would say underexposed is Steven Conrad. He’s a writer-director-creator. He’s been writing for years and years very successfully—Pursuit Of Happyness was him—a bunch of cool movies. He did Walter Mitty. But he started creating television recently, and he created a show for Amazon called Patriot, which I’d literally never heard of until I read the script for Perpetual Grace, which is his show that I’m on now. So I read the script for Perpetual Grace—was floored. One of the best scripts I’ve ever read. And I couldn’t wait to meet the man, the men: Bruce Terris and Steve Conrad both wrote Perpetual Grace. They said to watch Patriot first. I’m like, “The Mel Gibson movie?” And then I find out, no, it’s a series on Amazon.

And I watch it, and I’m just floored. It’s visionary. Not just the writing, the execution. It’s like your favorite directors of all time, like Kubrick, and Paul Thomas Anderson, and Michel Gondry, who have these innate abilities to communicate their style so completely, but somehow it feels effortless. You don’t feel like you’re being pushed to just absorb something. It feels like you’re watching a piece of art. And it connects to each person differently.

And so you can’t ask a critic about him who’s not over the moon about Steve Conrad, calling him the next phase in television creators. But, in general, most folks—the public—don’t know about him as much as they should. Luckily, I’ve become very close friends with him, and creative partners to a degree, and so I’m going to keep doing whatever I can to keep showing people how amazing Steven Conrad is. He’s more amazing than I’ll ever be, so just being next to a genius like that is good for me. And I feel lucky. And I think other people should feel as lucky as I do, just by getting to see his stuff.