Somehow didn’t see any Black Mirror after S3E2. Generally worth watching them all or are there many you should just skip in s3-5?
Also, any love for love, death, robots ITT? The best of that anthology are absolutely great imo. Some faves: Fish night, the secret war, the tall grass, swarm and perhaps my favorite, in vaunted halls entombed (because of the obvious HP Lovecraft and call of Cthulhu references, as a longtime player of the rpg).
Oh damn you stopped right before the best episode of the entire series, San Junipero.
It was. They mention it right before noticing Joan is Awful
She’s a really good actress, she has little extra edge to her.
A small thing but when he finds the drawings of his wife the normal trope and probably what happens most commonly in real life is for him to confront his wife even though the guy is who drew it. I liked that he immediately confronts the guy.
But space madness comes for us all.
“Looks like he wipes his arse with his house”
Lol
Joan is Awful 8/10
Fun and kind of meta on how they have middle size stars in Black Mirror, but just fun doesn’t really have much weight to it
Loch Henry 8/10
A well crafted horror thriller, that’s just that a well crafter thriller. Kind of like that airport thriller you pick up and enjoy but never remember again
Beyond the Sea 8.75/10
Great, Aaron Paul does a great job of being a cold introverted type and an outgoing suave sophisticated type. How well his marriage actually was is a good twist. His wife could have cheated on him but didn’t, they discussed their feelings, and he realized he needed to change something.
But madness.
Mazy Day 2/10*
*only points awarded for the final shots and for the nostalgia of Zaze Beats in a army surplus jacket, chipped black finger nail polish, and general indie vibe as someone I would have crushed on so hard in the 2000’s
Demon 79 9/10
Guy should win an Emmy for having to give any kind of performance in a disco suit, and he does really well. The lead is great too. Lol at a demon trying to talk someone out of killing a conservative politician because ‘he’s on their side’.
Didn’t quite get a 10 though. I can’t decide if I would have liked it unresolved, say cutting out with the ticking of the clock, but get why they didn’t. Because starting a relationship is the emotional conclusion of her arc.
In any case Demon 79’s my vote for best
FInally gor around to watching Season 2 of White Lotus. I have mixed feelings, but need to LOL at those of you who hated the Jennifer Coolidge story line. She absolutely carried the show. “Is Greg having an affiar” may be the most sublime moment in the history of HBO.
Almost all of the entertainment value Coolidge provided to season 2 came during the finale. It was a boring rehash of her season 1 performance until then. But her stuff in the finale was fantastic.
Disagree. I like White Lotus, but while I think the writing is generally good, a lot of it is a little too on the nose and in general the acting dosen’t rescue it. Tanya is obsetensively the most pathetic and broadly drawn character in the show, but Coolidege elevates the material and actually makes her the most authentic and beleivable. She is also very funny, and I didn’t laugh at anything else in this Armond-less season (you couldn’t pay me to watch a spinoff about Ethan and Harper, sorry). The Greg line is natually ironic as written, but as delivered it manifests everything about the Tanya character. It’s perfect and took two seasons to set up.
Did anyone else find that his ‘seduction’ mimicked the scene with his wife odd? Like he’s falling for her or infatuated with her at least but to do things the same way feels much more predatorish than some kind of genuine love. Maybe he was subconsciously wanting to recreate what he had with his wife, but still
I would say it was definitely the last part, he subconsciously wanted to recreate what he had. I felt as though it said something about his desperate need to recapture his lost true love, more than anything calculated and predatorish.
First 3 eps of Black Mirror have been quality, but still kinda disappointed b/c they don’t really feel like Black Mirror eps to me. My favorites have been the ones with outlandish, futuristic premises like 15 Million Credits and Hang the DJ. Both had intriguing setups and were well executed. But the setups here have been pretty standard sci/fi or ep 2, which could have been any series.
The score is truly abysmal.
Currently, the Samuel L. Jackson-led series sits at 70%.
Lol clickbait trash headlines🍿
The critical consensus:
Good grief; “What If” received a 94% through season 1? That show is mostly terrible. I didn’t get through Ms. Marvel or Moon Knight, so I’m also very dubious of their ratings north of 90%. But as always, RT is a terrible measuring stick.
Hard to believe 70% is the lowest rated Marvel show, hasn’t there been quite a bit of crap? Guess that ties into LKJ’s comment that RT sucks. IMDB’s rating seems like a pretty solid gauge, unless they’re a political/social reason that people are altering the score.
It might be one of those things where people who don’t like dumb superhero shit aren’t going to watch it and review it at all. So over long enough time-frames every mcu movie/show trends toward 100%
Agreed.
He’s not acting rationally. He has no earthly (heh) way to process the trauma. Even the body he shares with his fellow astronaut is not his own body. It is not even a “real” body. It is a replicant, and that of another person. It can only do so much to process the pain local to his own mind. Brings a whole new depth to the phrase (and book) “the body keeps the score.”
I loved when he tells the wife, “I see how you look at me.”
And she tells him, “At YOU?”
Reminding him whose body he is inhabiting. Reminding him how much of what he takes as an authentic reaction to “him” is actually her reaction to the body of her husband.
There’s a lot more to it than that, such as when she explains why the potential affair offered her clarity on the emotional absence in her marriage.
But it made me think back to an old 90s movie that premiered the trailer for Star Wars: the Phantom Menace. It was Meet Joe Black, a three-hour movie that some said was three hours too long. The joke is that it made its domestic gross due to most people buying a ticket for the Star Wars trailer, then leaving without watching the movie.
It’s a remake of an even older movie called Death Takes a Holiday, wherein you know what happens.
In Meet Joe Black, the Claire Forlani character first falls for Brad Pitt in a diner, then falls even harder for him over the course of the movie, but it’s while she still thinks Death–who is merely using the body as a shell–is the man she met at the start of the movie.
How can she begin to disentangle the assumption of who he was with how she felt about him once she knows who it was after that first meeting?
The movie doesn’t really offer an answer to that conflict except to resurrect Brad Pitt, who Claire Forlani instantly falls back in love with. Black Mirror is more like what would really happen.
Really appreciated Fabian’s comments, just wanted to add a few more.
Remember too that David’s greatest strength and yet his limitation is his memory.
He draws from memory. He feels from memory. He experiences from memory.
When he draws Cliff’s wife naked, he is most likely drawing the wife’s head/identity on a replicant of his wife’s body–a neat thematic parallel.
And when he reaches for embodied intimacy while sharing the body of Cliff’s replicant, David is once again constrained by his greatest strength. The strongest way he has to reconnect with the love he never found a way to grieve is to pick up where he left off, to literally replicate the physical elements essential to his memories, experiences, and identity.
The MCU movies have begun to take a critical beating. Quantumania (haven’t seen yet) and Eternals (saw it and cannot adequately describe how bored I was) both come in under 50% on RT. It is true that specifically the TV shows get a more narrow audience, but the RT scores are based on critic reviews.
Marvel, and nerd stuff in general, has this shitty problem where a bunch of the core fans are xenophobic wastes of air and they will negatively review-bomb basically anything where they feature women or people of color (though I’m guessing that a Samuel L. Jackson vehicle like Secret Invasion doesn’t quite get this treatment in the same way). Shows like Ms. Marvel and She-Hulk were getting hammered in the ratings before they even aired, so there’s a bunch of bad-faith trash infecting the scores. And it’s hard not to suspect that there is a counter-impulse by critics to lean toward giving positive reviews instead of fully honest ones.
As a general rule, public response is just less useful if there’s an ongoing franchise involved (in the case of nerd stuff, even the vastly superior IMDb ratings are hampered by this shit), and it doesn’t provide as much useful feedback if a person is on the fence about whether to watch it.
I enjoyed She-Hulk. It was fun and light. Also really enjoyed Fubar on Netflix recently. Arnold fans should def watch. It was also fun and not too serious. I like to balance out the Breaking Bads and Wires of the world with some stuff that has silly humor and the stakes never feel too high.
