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Post by Ozymandias on Jun 11, 2020 23:07:50 GMT -5
HOLY MOLEY!!! Designated Survivor season 3 does something that's probably unprecedented in a spy/thriller story!!! Isn't that one an American political thriller drama, starring Kiefer Sutherland?
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Jun 12, 2020 4:59:00 GMT -5
HOLY MOLEY!!! Designated Survivor season 3 does something that's probably unprecedented in a spy/thriller story!!! Isn't that one an American political thriller drama, starring Kiefer Sutherland? Yes, it's one half political shenanigans and one half with people running around chasing terrorists and nefarious plotters.
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Post by Ozymandias on Jun 12, 2020 8:28:59 GMT -5
Well, remember that 24 had quite the unusual ending, so not entirely surprised there.
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Post by rberman on Jun 17, 2020 11:56:49 GMT -5
I recently finished watching the first season of Penny Dreadful. While neither groundbreaking or extraordinary, it was good solid entertaining genre television. It had some solid performances by Timothy Dalton, Eva Green, Josh Hartnett and others, though Reeve Carney is pretty terrible. He is a cypher as Dorian Gray, and brings nothing to the show. I haven't ever seen anything else he did except clips of him as Peter Parker/Spider-Man in the Broadway Musical, but nothing in the first season makes me want to run out and see anything he is in. The show was made for cable, and well, the producers decided they needed to play up to that almost to the point of being gratuitous, especially most of the scenes revolving around Carney's Dorian Gray and his hedonistic lifestyle. They made some interesting choices in interpretations of some of the myth and folklore as well, but overall I enjoyed it enough that I am about to dive into the second season. -M I watched the first season a couple years back with my wife and while it was generally entertaining I never felt the need to continue on and I remember virtually nothing about it at this point. I guess I’d describe it as ephemeral because it left so little impression. My wife and I began watching Penny Dreadful about a year or so ago. I guess we watched about six episodes and, although we found it entertaining enough while it played, it never really hooked us. By that I mean we weren't chomping at the bit to watch the next episode the way we were with something like Game of Thrones or Mad Men. In the end we just decided that it was alright, but not really great enough to invest any more of our time in. I watched it through Netflix DVDs after the fact (Yes, Netflix still has a DVD service). The first two seasons were a decent variation on the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The third season was terrible.
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Post by beccabear67 on Jun 17, 2020 22:26:43 GMT -5
Last Night: Mae West (on PBS' American Masters). I didn't know a lot about her life/career and I like biographies, but a lot of this one was modern celebrity talking heads telling us how important she was which is becoming a real cliche. Other than that it was fairly interesting, especially the clips from interviews with Mae herself. Still, seemed very superficial for an over hour long program and I have not much more of a feeling of a three-dimensional person after watching than before. Usually I do get more of the sense of real person and their life than this gave. Theda Bara not mentioned at all, Clara Bow and Jean Harlow barely, so it could've used a bit more focus on the times she was a part of and less of the blazing a trail for various modern personages many I am ignorant of. Does it really mean anything to say there'd be no Lady Gaga or various drag performers without Mae West? I think she was more of here time than way ahead or liberated, but she was ahead it would seem in lack of prejudices many others did have. As Clara Bow gave Gary Cooper his first break, Mae gave Cary Grant his... and they did spend some time on that which was good. Of course it could be that she really wasn't very knowable in any depth, or in a way that might evoke empathy, maybe she was fairly two-dimensional; a short woman who wore big hats, tall shoes and corsets, and talked like Edward G. Robinson or Jimmy Cagney.
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Post by Ozymandias on Jun 18, 2020 3:31:15 GMT -5
I watched it through Netflix DVDs after the fact (Yes, Netflix still has a DVD service). The first two seasons were a decent variation on the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The third season was terrible. For me, the dip in quality was already noticeable in Season 2.
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Post by Batflunkie on Jun 18, 2020 10:38:55 GMT -5
Watched Ultimate Tag on Fox last night. Wasn't much else on except for reruns of Home Improvement, Roseanne, and Green Acres/Hogan's Heroes. Interesting concept, American Gladiators mixed with Tag football. Really doubt that it'll last more than a season
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Post by beccabear67 on Jun 18, 2020 13:29:38 GMT -5
We have a German channel in preview mode lately and they have a weekly two hour plus (!) length show called 'Superhero Germany'. It seems based somewhat on the American Gladiators show where contestants, one man, one woman, challenge a regular hero cast. My favorite bit is where the men play volleyball with a big heavy medicine ball! There's also another where they have to throw big tires up onto a tall spike to rack up points.
The channel also has some sort of Cops style show set on the streets of Berlin (I suspect it's a bit scripted actually), and various Judge _______ programs. It's always fun to sample to tv from somewhere else... right now we get a couple Filipino channels too and other times we've had Chinese and East-Indian channels (the later have some great super-heroish shows old and new). The real fave for me is a Japanese channel, especially the show where an old man on a bicycle just tours around the country at a very relaxed pace. I could care less about the One Piece cartoons though, not my cuppa... however on one cooking show they made some kind of desert favored by cartoonist Osamu Tezuka interspersed with pretty in-depth biography stuff about their God Of Comics. Wish I'd had a (working) recorder for that one! We have a number of French channels and one Spanish one regularly so they are more familiar and less exotic. Also one multi-cultural channel where the Chinese movies have subtitles in English (and also either Cantonese or Mandarin depending on the film) and I like the historical type ones with or without Kung-Fu action.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Jun 18, 2020 13:43:40 GMT -5
Watched Ultimate Tag on Fox last night. Wasn't much else on except for reruns of Home Improvement, Roseanne, and Green Acres/Hogan's Heroes. Interesting concept, American Gladiators mixed with Tag football. Really doubt that it'll last more than a season Rerun Hogan's Heroes sounds better.
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Post by Batflunkie on Jun 21, 2020 13:40:07 GMT -5
Really been enjoying "F Is For Family". It's nice to have a show on Netflix that doesn't have any serious drama/overarching plot with it that you can unwind to. It does have a plot throughline though, which I appreciate. Like something minor that happens in one episode carries over into the next
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Post by Deleted on Jun 23, 2020 14:07:52 GMT -5
Apple TV debuted the first look at Asimov's Foundation:
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Post by BigPapaJoe on Jun 24, 2020 11:50:38 GMT -5
UPDATE!!! Unsolved Mysteries reboot is finally be released by Netflix on July 1st. This is a top 3 show all time for me. It was a long wait since the initial announcement was about a year and a half ago. No host this time, which I was really surprised about at first. But after thinking about it further, I understand why they decided not to have a host. It would just be too difficult to find someone that could measure up to Robert Stack, and ultimately would serve as a distraction. There will be 12 episodes for season 1, and 6 to be released at first. Only one case per episode though, so that's different. I'm already excited from the trailer though. I do wonder if this new iteration will leave me terrified like the old cases did. A lot of time has passed since then, and I think the original show was just a perfect storm of circumstances that made something bigger than the sum of it's parts. Perhaps this will be just another show that will easily get lost in the shuffle of any other crime-solving docu-series. At least the original creators are involved though, along with the people with Stranger Things. I hope it doesn't suck like The Twilight Zone revamp did.
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Post by rberman on Jun 24, 2020 11:56:18 GMT -5
Chernobyl is an excellent mini-series that started when its creator wondered exactly what went wrong in that nuclear disaster, and how it could be made intelligible to other people. (Comic books covered this briefly in Wolverine and Havok: Meltdown #1 by the way.) The show has been criticized for making the bureaucracy of the Soviet Union seem crueler and more incompetent than it really was, but the broad strokes are valid enough.
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Post by brutalis on Jun 24, 2020 15:21:58 GMT -5
Had heard of a 2016 series called Beowolf:Return to the Shieldlands. Actually found the entire season 1 (only season) last night at Big Lots for $3. Figure worth that to check out the series since I do love me some historical/fantasy.
Also picked up Best of Abbott & Costello movies set 2 for $3 & the DC animated Superman Unbound for $3. Watched it last night & was decent entertaining movie reflecting the better aspects of Superman & his mythos.
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Post by beccabear67 on Jun 26, 2020 23:11:21 GMT -5
I watched the recent Stan & Ollie feature movie 'on demand' ($4 Can.) starring Coogan and Reilly and really enjoyed it... it was lovely! I genuinely have love, and feel the love in the film, for Laurel & Hardy. They brought so much gentle enjoyment to so many. I knew they were quite popular in the U.K. with the Sons Of The Desert club having many members there (comic artist George Evans in the U.S. was one and he did art for their fan publications), and the scene when they are docking in Ireland was especially nice! I did know a little about Laurel's later life in retirement. It's 'rental' is good for 48 hours so going to see if the folks want to see it tomorrow night in place of a Foyle's War.
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