But Is It on Netflix? - Streaming Video Service Thread: Hulu, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, Disney+, Peacock, YouTube TV, AT+T Watch, Philo, Playstation Vue, HBO Max, HBO Now, Facebook Live and many more

ha ha i just watched the preview and it looks so awful, everyone is chiseled and beautiful and very clean. oddly i just watched sorcerer for the first time yesterday, obviously an incredible movie, but the original clouzot movie is also fantastic.

It's already TWO great movies.

Girls5Evah was great all the way through, love to have more of that 30 Rock-style joke writing & pace. Actually funny songs too.

i should watch that with maria. we need a good comedy to watch.

There’s a thread for 3 Body Problem, for those looking for discussion. I came away with extremely mixed feelings. I think I’m glad I watched it and am still fairly interested in where it’s going.

Constellation, on the other hand—the AppleTV show about parallel dimensions. WOOF. What a tedious and frustrating show. Hilarious that it ended on a cliffhanger, since I can’t imagine it will get picked up for a second season. Avoid avoid avoid.

I've been half-watching Renegade Nell but really dislike the 'vignetted' style it's filmed or rendered in where the edges and backgrounds are really blurry and the centre really grainy. Just looks like garbage on my fairly new TV and baffled by this aesthetic choice (this isn't the only recent show like this with it) - also that overdone blue tint on everything.

Is there a thread for the show? xp

The only one I can see (where there is some discussion) has lots of book spoilers so I left that one sharpish

xpost Huh, we are I think four episodes into Constellation (so, halfway) and we are actually enjoying it, though my wife just complained that she wished there was more space and less space madness.

xpost Huh, we are I think four episodes into Constellation (so, halfway) and we are actually enjoying it, though my wife just complained that she wished there was more space and less space madness.

Is there a thread for the show? xp

The only one I can see (where there is some discussion) has lots of book spoilers so I left that one sharpish

I avoided Constellation on the general principle that Noomi Rapace is bad and only seems to be in bad things.

The first episode had "should have been three hours not 10" energy so I never went back for the second episode. Fool me once (Silo) won't get fooled again

girls5eva is really funny. just what the doctor ordered. i needed a lift yesterday. when i was young this girl i was seeing on and off came in to where i worked crying and told me she was pregnant and i thought *ohnoohmygodmylifeisover* and then she told me it wasn't mine and i thought *ohthankyoujesusiwilldogoodworksfromnowon* and then i hugged her and was nice and felt bad because i knew her nightmare fucking mother and it turned out the father was a friend of mine and that kid was on girls5eva! small world! i recognized them right away. they are old now like me.

also, my favorite movie WAS The Wrath of Becky but NOW it is Mafia Mamma. saw both on Paramount+.

FWIW, I like "Constellation" more than "Silo" (so far). I think Jonathan Banks is miscast, but I like Rapace in it just fine. It's definitely slow, but when I think it over its pace seems OK, and I don't feel like it's holding back information artificially, just the character is slowly figuring things out at the same speed we are. Let's see if it bogs down in bullshit. I can totally see that happening.

Two new Elsbeth episodes tonight for those who celebrate...

i will watch.

Watched the first episode of Ripley on Netflix and I'm not sure what the hype is about. It's...OK, but it starts with one of my least favorite devices (in medias res, then SIX MONTHS EARLIER) and honestly I don't understand why people love Andrew Scott so much. Oh, well.

one of my least favorite devices (in medias res, then SIX MONTHS EARLIER)

omg yes just tell a story in linear order please.

It's not even a very useful flash-forward. Ripley's done something bad! But of course he has, HE'S RIPLEY

Always feels like they have no faith in their audience's attention span when they pull that trick. The show Alias was particularly bad for overusing it

There was a period around 20 years ago (!!!!) when Battlestar used to do this every week, and even then it got predictable.

With Ripley, it reminded me of a show my 4-year-old watches, Barbie Dreamhouse Adventures. That starts with a flash forward every episode. ("Barbie's pulling a corpse down the stairs -- how did that happen??")

I recently re-watched “John Wick,” and was reminded (and a little surprised) that it uses this device… it doesn’t seem necessary for that movie, you don’t know who this guy is going in, and in fact it drains some of the suspense knowing that he is still alive at the end (if you even remember after 15 minutes or so how it began).

I recently watched John Wick for the first time and was surprised that people have been going on about this shit for a decade

A big part of what made the first one so much fun (IMO) was that there was no real context for it when it came out… it was just this cool new movie that felt fresh & clever, and was done well.

Then the sequel somehow felt to me like it was already like the 5th entry in a franchise; it all felt played out (and there was much less reason to care about the character)… and now they really have made five of them… blah blah

it just feels kinda gross now. cuzza guns. and all the guns. and people here just want to see guns. and people dying from guns.

not that i don't watch a ton of gun/action movies. i do. those just seem...worse now. an overdose of guns. like the porn habit that has to get more extreme or something. i'm a death metal fan. i get it.

I remember enjoying the first two John Wick movies (though I don't really remember the second one), but I caught the third one on a plane recently and bailed on it around halfway through. There was just no tension or impact. It's like watching someone play a video game. I kind of blame modern VFX for making it so cheap to kill hundreds of extras, and it all just looks so fake and video gamey. People being shot in the face point blank and you just see this CG blood splotch show up. The guns have no recoil, there's no mess when people are shot, and we didn't know the character to begin with so there's no emotional impact. In terms of massive scale fights with tons of extras getting messed up; the Raid 2 was way more gripping and gut churning. I think this is one reason why some people I know who are violence-averse will tolerate the violence in the John Wick movies to see more Keanu. Yet there are prime-time TV shows that are too violent for their taste.

I've been watching The Good Fight. Gary Cole is wonderful as a supporting character. I was like, "the first thing I ever saw him in was American Gothic, that short-lived Sam Raimi show." Later I saw him as a supporting character in Sam Raimi's A Simple Plan. I don't remember him in much else, except Veep, of course. I love Gary Cole.

Anyway, I wanted to watch American Gothic again. I remember loving it as a teenager. A very young Sarah Paulson is a major character and my bf loves her. It's only "buy the whole series" on Amazon so I got it. Gonna start it up tonight. I hope it's good! The preview looks kinda awful. I remember thinking, of the pilot episode, at age 16 or whatever, "this is the best hour of television I've ever seen". I don't remember why I didn't finish the series, but probably because it was shifting around on the TV schedule?

xp I am only of those ppl who is very squeamish when it comes to "realistic" violence, but was not bothered by the violence in John Wick 1, b/c somehow it's presented with a certain degree of absurdity (i.e., there's no emotional impact). I think it was deliberately filmed that way, and it works. IIRC, the violence in Pt. 2 was even more "absurd" (like when Keanu and Common have that "covert" shoot-out in the subway); but there was a su1cide scene that I found disturbing and a turn-off.

The entire setup of Pt. 2 (IIRC) completely undid the point of the first movie; it turned out he would have been drawn back into the assassin life anyway, due to this retconned "obligation" to some dude from the past? And you have no investment in whether he succeeds or not, b/c he's not seeking personal revenge (like in Pt. 1), it's just assassins doing assassin sh1t...

one of my least favorite devices (in medias res, then SIX MONTHS EARLIER)

i despise it. it's been used effectively here and there, there are a couple film noirs which use it pretty well, the opening being the protagonist subjected to some interrogation over the events leading up to his current situation, or for example Out of the Past does a slight variation on it which works, but it's mostly pretty bad. They used it for every single episode in ZeroZeroZero, and it was really ineffective in an otherwise v good series. Even the film Starship Troopers, which i otherwise completely love, used it to ill effect. how much better would it have been to have no idea what these fresh-faced, overly cocky fascist recruits were in for?

You're probably wondering how I got here

the Wick flicks are mostly diminishing returns, maybe not in terms of how well-made the films are, but how i've come to feel about them. they just sort of feel like cold, empty, more extreme versions of Hong Kong films in the same genre. here you're just watching a first-person shooter game, pausing for scenes where our protagonist earns points and gets clues. i think three hours of Pt 4 did it for me.

all of the wick takes in here are completely wrong. two eats one's fucking lunch. the fourth is the other best one. operatic action movies of an order i thought were gone at least in u.s. cinema forever

I agree that the Wick movies get less fun as they go along, except for Halle Berry and her dogs. I haven't even watched the fourth one, because three fucking hours? Fuuuuuck you.

that resident alien show did that six months earlier thing in every single episode.

china/japan/korea/indonesia action for me. in general.

JW Pt.4 goes on forever but the last 40 minutes is fucking great. Is my review.

it'll sound like a contradiction but i think the wick films are objectively incredible across the board, they're not morally suspect (imo, despite the relentless gunplay, though i can't argue w/those who feel otherwise) or incompetent and if anything they're refreshingly forward thinking in many ways. i generally think the first two are more effective maybe bc the villains are better, etc. Ruby Rose and Common in 2 are A+. but i just don't really wind up feeling much of anything after the scores were settled in the first film. i think the absurdity of the escalating challenges and resetting of the goalposts for John's escape hatch just maybe makes it both more impressive as a series in terms of spectacle but less in terms of feeling like it matters. i can't fault anyone who loves them because there's obviously a lot to love, even if i don't personally feel much, and everyone involved in the production seems pretty cool. Stahelski seems like a guy who really is a true pro and makes action films the right way. my mind changed one way on these films i guess it could change another way, there are plenty of worse action movies out there.

i think the absurdity of the escalating challenges and resetting of the goalposts

In general, I admire this idea... the "Taken" movies are a good example of it (at least the first sequel; I recall Pt. 3 felt like a bit of a stretch).

i like omar l’s take and i think i lean towards it. aiui the gun fu in the first was v innovative and new to US audiences at least. but it’s also a case of keep going deeper and deeper in a single minded way into single simple thing: gun violence, for all that there are variations at the edges.

i agree about the stakes being lower and that weakening it. but really it’s all about the violence.

and it does that well and is *interested* in how it can be done well and refined. sure, that leads to decadence. i’m ok with that.

I've got no problem with the violence in the Wick movies, because they are, in a sense, occurring in a parallel world where apparently literally everyone is a sleeper agent or hitman, which is totally absurd. In that sense they are almost satires in their hyper-stylization and fetishization of violence.

A big part of what made the first one so much fun (IMO) was that there was no real context for it when it came out… it was just this cool new movie that felt fresh & clever, and was done well.

Kind of wild that this was also true for the paradigm shifting Matrix, or even something like Speed. Keanu (or his agent) has a knack for picking these sorts of projects.

in a parallel world where apparently literally everyone is a sleeper agent or hitman, which is totally absurd.

Yes! I noticed this in particular when watching the sequel... I think literally every character who speaks onscreen, even someone minor like a flight attendant, is somehow "in on" the secret assassin world. It's pretty clever.

i believe it’s at least in part keanu himself who’s picked up on this. read it somewhere anyway. xpost

Another technique that nullifies any emotional impact of the violence is that the film never highlights or wallows/delights in any fear, remorse, regret, etc. of the guys getting killed... if anything, they mostly act irritated that their time is up (or are just like, "Ugh, fuck you!" when they're about to get offed).

scott & everyone ilu & this convo is close to my heart but OMG we have a perfectly good john wick thread elsewhere

xp Right, they're samurai films.

The fact that he's not dead at the start of the second one shouldn't, I feel, count against the fact that he definitely dies at the end of the first, which (to go back a bit), is a decent noirish reason for the in media res.

Post-Wick 1, the best parts are the weirdo world building scenes like the gun sommelier. The world is a Catholic Libertarian paradise where the Reformation never happened and murder is legal as long as it follows the Rules of Acquisition.

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