О фильмах и сериалах
Finished second season of Clarkson’s Farm.
Second season is mostly dedicated to cows. Some cows appear to be notoriously hard to get pregnant. And that means they have to be converted into burgers instead. And a single cow can feed 1000 people, apparently. Sounds like a lot. But 1000 people is not even a month of a restaurant opperation.
Also, there are badgers, that can transfer their tuberculosis to the cows, and are protected animals, so you can’t shoot them.
Another interesting fighting video game history video.
There’s a lot of speculation, as usual, but the design of one character blew my mind 😆
Finished first season of Clarkson’s Farm. I’m not sure how relatable it is for people outside of the UK, but for someone who’s been living there for quite a while, it’s spot-on. And has a lot of interesting details about what it involves to be a farmer.
For me, the most interesting part were the sheep. The relatioship of Jeremy genuinely caring for them, but then also liking the fact that boxes of mutton sell well and shepherds pie is tasty.
And as a bonus, there are those glimpses of British wildlife, like foxes, stupid deer and ridiculous owls.
I’m simply amazed how much meaningful content they managed to squeeze into two hours of screen time. Time to wonder why Star Wars are not able to do the same. But we all know the answer, don’t we?
There is clear motivation for every character, there are brief but accurate explanations of the world setting, and each episode has it’s own well defined mood. Just the episode where heroes had to speak with dead barbarians could redeem another movie in my eyes.
Underdark action scenes are mind-blowing.
Standoff between two wizards is even better.
And there is a lot of respect to the source material, tons of references, instead of just making stuff up.
Completed first season of Succession.
It became my “flight series”, as I could watch it during takeoff and landing from my phone, as there isn’t much in terms of visuals.
Interesting how a story can be hyper-realistic and absurd at the same time. Kind of like Breaking Bad, I guess. But not as bad.
There are not a single character with redeeming qualities in those series. And no clear morals.
Does it make sense to continue buying cable stations, or should the company pivot? Is it immoral to sell family business, if the business is run by a demented tyrant, Logan? Would his weak son, Kendal, be a better alternative? Maybe by the end of the series there will be some conclusive answers. But that’s not a course in company management, after all.
I didn’t expect to enjoy it so much. Christian Bale and the guy from Blade Runner are great, but there is also the guy from Midnight Mass, and hilariously Kendal from Succession . And the evil guy from Umbrella Academy. Damn, I forgot the Umbrella Academy.
Breaking the 4th wall, led by Ryan Gosling, is something that movie does hilariously well.
The general tone reminded me of Dopesick, though. Everyone was “just doing their job”, “playing a system just a little”, and it all ended up in a huge disaster. But nobody paid the price for it. Except us, of course.
– Bombs?
– Moths. It’s Italian wool, and I love it.
At least this movie understands some signature elements. The sniper rifle, the .45s, the garrotte, changing uniforms.
It’s still ridiculous at times, like shooting a handcuff chain with a sniper rifle. But still.
The bait-and-switch with John Smith is pretty good. The idea of a female assassin is pretty good, considering we already had Hitman: Absolution.
The airport scene is pretty amusing. Again, a play on both changing costumes and avoiding cameras.
I decided that I need to fill the gaps in my education by watching American Psycho. And I didn’t get it. Maybe I wasn’t watching closely enough.
Like some bits of it are hilarious. The introductory monologue about vane morning routine. The “competition” around business cards. Or how during sex Patrick mostly interested in how he looks in the mirror.
And someone spoiled for me the fact that he didn’t kill people for real. But I expected that this was all more figural fantasies. While it seems that the story was about a mentally unwell person all that time.
Finished watching the first season of The Bear.
It’s very novel, intentionally intense, unrealistic in being realistic.
The last two episodes of the season are just one example: one being 20 minutes instead of the usual 30, with all that time people screaming at each other. While the last episode is almost 50 minutes, with Carmy giving that speech about the relatioship with his brother for 6 minutes straight.
Of course there’s a lot of food closeups, which is expected. And you have to learn about Chicago culture, which I don’t care for much. And a lot of the kitchen jargon, which I found quite interesting and with “behind”/”corner” even useful sometimes.
I guess that watching “Escape from LA” standalone might be alright, but watching it a few days after “Escape from New York” is a strange experience. There’s a 15-year gap between the events of the two movies, and a 15-year gap between the original and the sequel being filmed. But despite it being a sequel, it feels more like a remake because it follows all the same plot twists, just altered a little.
Here the differences begin to show. As I mentioned, “Escape from New York” was a zombie movie in disguise. This is a Western.
Again, Snake is caught and awaiting being sent to another prison island. Again, someone ejects on this island shortly before, this time not the President himself, but his daughter. Again, Snake needs to recover not so much as the daughter, she is to be disposed of, but what she carries in a briefcase. And again, he is injected with something lethal with a strict time limit. There is even a crazy ruler of the island that plans an escape. This time a Latino, and not a black guy, though.
This time Snake uses a submarine and acts as an idiot immediately, without waiting for the final sequence, as with the original minefield run, losing the submarine and thus his means of return in the process. Seeing the ruler, he decides just to take all his convoy head on, by himself. Here the budget begins to show: there are lots of explosions. The whole scene is just ridiculous, with Snake riding a bike on a single wheel, and fighting a guy on a horse for some reason.
Interesting how they tried to incorporate anything fashionable. In the original, Snake had to fight in a ring? Now he has to play street basketball. And the crowd cheers him in the same manner.
What else is fashionable? Surfing? Sure, Snake can surf!
Turns out, I vaguely remember the ending where Snake blasts the entire globe with an EMP, and Pam Grier’s character, which is supposed to be trans, a novelty in ’96.
I also misremembered, thinking that throughout the movie, characters are referencing to the events of “Escape from New York.” They mostly talk about Cleveland, which is never depicted in movies, but was retconned in comics.
The only notably good part is the ending. It ties nicely the ticking virus plot (which turns out to be a fraud, nothing more than a flu), and the holograms from the beginning of the movie, and the fact that Snake refuses to take either side of the American fascists or the socialist invaders from Mexico and Cuba.
Snake Plissken is a cult character. Although I’ve seen Escape from Los Angeles a couple of times as a kid (and I remember nothing), I’ve never seen Escape from New York. So, I decided to remedy it.
There are still some key elements that Kojima will exploit in the Metal Gear Solid series. Like Snake being tricked into accepting a lethal timed poison under the guise of “antitoxin,” or rescuing the president, where the goal is actually not to extract the president himself, but what he carries. An audiotape with nuclear secrets, apparently.
Also funny how Snake carries that now-iconic gun of his. In fact, it’s just a MAC-10 with a large silencer and a useless scope, but then every gun has a scope in this movie except the M16, which is the only gun that should have a scope. But he rarely even uses it.
It is basically a strange zombie movie, where the “Crazies,” cannibals living in the sewers, play the part. There are two “zombie” scenes. First, when the girl gets dragged under the floor, and Snake has to block a window with a bookcase. Then later, an escape in a car.
Then, there’s a “bum fight”. Snake and a former restler are given bats with nails.
And the most irrational bit is the mined bridge. This is the most irritating bit. This is a prison island. Who would place mines in a pattern that could be avoided with a map? And Snake acts as an asshole without any clear reason, just blowing up a Cabbie on a mine, then Brain blows himself up on a mine without reason too. It’s like they just wanted to get rid of all of those characters, so they wouldn’t need to carry them over a wall.
Interesting how, by the middle of the movie, Snake gets an arrow in his leg and limps for the entire rest of the movie. And how almost every other character has heard about him, saying things like “I thought you were dead” or “What are you doing here?”.
Kurt Russell plays badly. Actually, everyone plays badly, except Adrienne Barbeau.
There’s a very interesting note that Peter Molyneux wasn’t involved much in Syndicate, because he was always focused on a single game at a time.
A very strange one. It starts with Iron Man almost dying, and then Thanos killed in 5 minutes.
Then in turns into that postapocalypse and “bringing the old team together”. There are a lot of references, some I did get, some I didn’t.
Then is the last part, Armageddon all over again. But I’ll admit, it’s slightly better this time.
Captain Marvel is a horrible character. I can’t believe they are trying to make a third movie about her.
It’s the epitome of a Mary Sue with a Karen attitude on top.
There’s no challenge, no conflict, just a one-woman-torpedo:
Finished watching Dopesick. There’s very little justice in real life. Although this is just part of the story, as the last episode focuses of indicment of a few Purdue managers, and we’re never told how Oxycontin sales were stopped, for example.
John Brownlee is a real prosecutor, although not as handsome in real life as depicted in the film.
I enjoyed those two videos far more than I should have:
There are no supervillains. Everyone was just “doing their job”. Marketing marketed the drug, sales pushed it, doctors did their due diligence. It’s all a composition of small little lies. So, it wasn’t a cited study, but just a letter to the editorial, but who cares, right?
The series has almost a zombie apocalipsys feel to me. To the point of “nothing will save you from this”. Not Anonymous Alcoholics. Not rehab. Not Jesus. There’s no escape.
Rosario Dawson performance is astonishing. Such as shame it’ll be wasted on something like Star Wars.
Stormfront is a fun new addition for sure. But the second season is basically Homelander’s show.
For the first couple of episodes, I was pessimistic. But the show does well what it does: showing a N-sided conflict.
Stormfront kills Kimiko’s brother. We have The Boys, who now want revenge.
But by doing so, she also seized the agenda, so Homelander is envious.
Both series cover the same even, the Opioid Epidemic in the 90s, but from different perspectives.
Painkiller is more of a crime drama, where the Sackler family and their salesmen (and more importantly saleswomen) are presented like in “Wolf from Wall Street”.
Sackler constantly sees his diseased uncle approving his actions, even if just in his head.
Dopesick is much more down to earth in many aspects. It focuses on a doctor, a community leader, and how he feels he failed his community.
It’s also interesting the different approach to the lead female character. While Painkiller undersexualizes her while oversexualizing the saleswomen, Dopesick does exactly the opposite.
Sackler in Painkiller is Jack Nicholson’s Joker. Sackler in Dopesick is Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker.
Enjoyed it less than I expected. And in general, it was a different movie from what I thought it would be.
I expected it to be a parody hermetic mystery where the Patriarch stages his own death to prove how rotten his family is. The family indeed turns out to be rotten, but not in the way I’d expect.
The writing is quite good, I must admit. For example not a single person remembers from which country the nurse, Marta, originally from. They all say different South American countries: Ecuador, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil. Ironically, I myself made the same mistake, thinking that Anna de Armas was born in Brazil. She’s from Cuba.
Then they’re also making fun of the youngest girl in the family begin “some crypto-marxist-gender studies student” while the youngest boy is “alt right Nazi troll”. Figures. Speaking of the youngest girl, Katherine Langford looks like she was filming in between “13 Reasons Why”, without even changing the makeup.
Here are a few interesting explanations to what’s going on in terms of storyline structure:
Finished watching first season of Silo.
As far as thrillers go, this one is pretty solid. The cliffhanger at the end of every, fucking, episode, is a bit too much, but still, it’s fun to watch.
I liked the twist with George.