yeah someone put the first episode on for me a while back and i couldn’t get over how it had somehow cherry-picked the worst parts of 2D and 3D animation. i want to check the rest of it out cozit sounds like there’s a lot there but like, whew, i’m so busy, oh no
It’s vastly improved animation-wise. It still has a pretty big problem where every single scene needs to end with a joke, no matter what, so basically it’s impossible to do anything dramatically. Fun show, though.
i just got netflix back after about a year and a half of not using it and i am completely lost holy shit there is a sea of netflix shows now
The dark crystal one is kinda rough plot wise but has non-stop amazing puppets.
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Terrace House this season has a female pro wrestler and it kind of owns
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Not sure if this is the place to post about it, but, I’ve become a pretty diehard On Cinema At The Cinema fan over the past few years, thanks largely to their always-great Oscar specials. This year’s was not a disappointment.
Essentially, OCATC starts with this base premise that is itself incredibly tired and shitty - this basic-ass movie review webshow where they rate absolutely everything 5 out of 5 - then the meta-narrative flourishes as Tim and Greg find ever-more exotic ways to be petty, off-putting or baffoonish. They did a four-hour real-life trial when Tim accidently got 6 people killed by selling super sketchy vape pens at an EDM festival.
Their Oscar specials are always done live, contain essentially zero material related to the Oscars, and always escalate into some kind of horrific fire or disaster at the end. In this year’s one, Greg decked out his shitty car for his VHS archive brand, and just had the thing running the entire show, as everyone involved became slowly and steadily poisoned by carbon monoxide. There’s a good 5-10 minute stretch where you’re almost certain everyone is dead. It’s wild.
It’s a really hard show for me to recommend to people because you have to like Tim Heidecker’s style of comedy for any of it to work. I’d say the best place to start would be to watch one On Cinema Oscar Special and see how you like it.
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it’s not a show - it’s a world, a mindset
you didn’t even mention Decker, or Dekkar!
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it has been a real netflix dry spell lately so we are watching this thing called ‘medical police’ that is a spinoff of children’s hospital
the whole thing is about how the cdc is underfunded and there’s a massive bioterror virus attack
i can’t tell if it’s good or bad that this was released early in january and no one will pay any attention to it
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I liked medical police more than children’s hospital, I thought it was a delight
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it’s pretty good! i can’t remember how much of children’s hospital i watched but i feel like it definitely overstayed its welcome. sometimes david wain eu stuff is like exactly what i want and other times i just find it exhausting.
i do really appreciate the ‘every line is a joke’ style of this show, even if 75 - 90% of them don’t really land, it is still fun to watch
there’s something about children’s hospital and all of it’s spinoffs where it feels like the writers aren’t just trying to parody genre tropes but are trying to somehow backflip over them? it’s hard to describe like they are constantly trying to make not just “a joke” but incredibly specifically surprising jokes. trying to one up themselves
i have been watching the new netflix Lupin series this week, it’s pretty good i think? like the writing and general plotting is really uneven, i don’t think i’ve ever watch a heist/crime thing with as many glaringly obvious plot holes as this, but at the same time i find it kind of compelling. i guess the basic synopsis of it is like, the bbc sherlock reboot but for lupin, and in this version the original lupin stories still exist and are the inspiration for the protagonist.
i think the most unequivocally positive thing i can say about it, and this means a lot In These Times, is that whoever was doing the production design really worked their ass off. every single interior in the show is just… full of stuff. it’s hard to explain but like whenever a scene takes place in a person’s house or office, every single surface is just stacked with books and plants and dishes and other objects and the walls are covered in posters and shit. it’s overwhelming but it still makes all of the places feel very lived in? like it doesn’t feel super exaggerated or unrealistic even though it probably would become that way if you paused and started analyzing it. it’s really worth watching for the kind of voyeuristic charm of this, in this era in which we are all deprived of getting to spy on our friends by looking in their medicine cabinets or whatever.
the one moment this gets out of hand is when they show the desk of the cop who is starting to like, put together the fact that the main character’s MO is just stealing gimmicks from Lupin stories and basing his IRL crimes on them (lol), they show his TV Detective Whiteboard and the whole thing is just like, covered in blown up images of Lupin book covers. I … don’t think that’s really gonna help you put the pieces together buddy
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I am apparently the only person on this forum who is a stickler about the definition of TV and therefore is still using this thread even though I now watch Netflix on the Television. It’s not broadcast damnit.
Anyway
There is apparently a show called “Another Life” that is a NETFLIX ORIGINAL even though it has big Canadian Content vibes. I mean, it’s not Canadian, just shot there like everything else, but feels vaguely Canadian in a way it’s still hard for me to define
Anyway it’s like not particularly good? But it’s a quick paced sci-fi drama thing about a ship sent to investigate the planet of origin of a strange and mysterious alien probe that appears on earth one day in the dystopian future. Half the show (or more like 1/3) takes place on earth while scientists try to do science to the alien structure, the rest is on the ship going into space and encountering space problems.
I don’t want to mislead anyone, the show is not good, but it manages to keep me wanting to find out what happens next so I’m going to finish it. Also, it’s not like so bad that I can fully understand why I literally never saw any promotional material for the show. Like it seemed to just appear on netflix one day… much like the mysterious structure from space appears outside the window of the influencer/journalist Selma Blair. I guess in the future journalists are just like video bloggers, and also the most famous one of them is played by Selma Blair.
The ways that it is bad mostly revolve around it feeling like … a Prometheus prequel? By that I mean the scientists and astronauts are both just constantly making incredibly bad decisions, and generally acting like children. With the spaceship crew it almost feels deliberate, like there’s some part of the worldbuilding that requires astronauts to all be like 19 years old? Other than the captain. But that part isn’t explained really.
So it’s not great, but watchable. The fucked up thing about it is, one of the main reasons I have been digging it is because it is (finally) a near-future space exploration movie that doesn’t appear to actually be about a) how space makes people go insane and want to kill their crewmates or b) how going into space is really all about resolving the issues you have with your father/children/etc.
So that was very refreshing, until it comes to like, the 6th out of 10 episodes, and all of a sudden it becomes BOTH about Space Dads and Space Madness. Well, the Space Madness is not exactly Sunshine/Event Horizon levels, but it is like… reminiscent of those. We literally can’t get away from this bullshit! WHY!!! Why does this have to happen in every single one of these pieces of shits!
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I don’t know who of y’all are Bo Burnham stans around here, I can’t keep track of things like that any more, but he has a new special on netflix called Inside that he shot over a year of pandemic isolation in his little house and once again he hits directly at his own mental state in a way that’s raw, yet defensively cloaked in irony better than any other comedian or comedy writer I can name.
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i haven’t double-checked in a while but i think i’m probably still a #bohead over here. looking forward to it
Watched this and yeah, he’s so good at this.
Is the Bo Burnham character just an act? Something about his specials after that first big Edinburgh show have played sort of cynical – cynical as in the “rawness” of his work is almost too overproduced. He’s very clever and hard working, everything aspect of his specials is very well choreographed and they were always closer to plays than stand-up performances.
His depressed clown character hits way closer to the audience’s own insecurities and anxieties than most other comedians’ acts. He’s very good at anticipating and molding the audience’s thoughts. But for him it often seemed like this wasn’t the “real Bo Burnham”, he just knows exactly what buttons to press emotionally the same way he carefully choreographs everything else in his specials.
This special only confused me more. He’s so deep into irony that the character just constantly circles around itself, Creator Bo playing depressed Bo playing creator Bo playing depressed Bo. There’s so much artifice in this new special, from the carefully lit and composed shots of him crying, to him controlling a game version of himself crying on demand, to the conceit of his whole world for a year being confined to a single room (true for many people this past year, but likely not actor/director/Netflix-funded Bo).
At the same time, this special, even more than his past specials, basically demands you to believe he is the character. If the description of his anxiety and depression related to stand-up isn’t as serious as reality, then he’s more cynical than I had imagined. I left believing that maybe he isn’t playing much of a character, though who knows.
This analysis is somewhat irrelevant as, cynical or not, he usually is pretty effective at hitting a nerve.
Part of my response is also likely jealousy since I would love to have near endless independent time to work on a creative project. I understand feeling depressed and anxious in the middle of a giant creative project, but making a large portion of the project about that is a bit much considering the opportunity it is.
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The key to it all working is that he suspects himself of this exactly. He labors always under the lingering suspicion that he is actually a privileged piece of shit who is wearing mental health crises as a costume to produce material for which he is being paid handsomely - does his anxiety about this suspicion qualify as a legitimate mental health crisis that makes it all actually not cynical after all? And on and on, layer after layer.
That’s what the ending is about, right? It’s all genuine, it’s all artifice, all the real becomes fake and real again.
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This too is part of a recursive self-flagellation. Of course he knows that getting to spend a year making a “comedy” “special” is itself a privilege, he says this pretty directly in the film. But what’s he gonna do, become a teacher or a nurse or an activist? What, and not get paid? Ok, haha, I’m privileged, but - after all - isn’t this some kind of art, and isn’t producing art part of the human project? Don’t people enjoy and find catharsis in what I make? That’s pretty good, isn’t it? I mean it’s not fighting for human rights in Palestine, but… And round and round it goes.
This kind of radical anxiety about imposter syndrome writ into every aspect of life I find very compelling as a cri de coeur of the first internet generation. He (or, the “he” depicted in the work we have access to) is a good example of a kind of philosophical archetype, the artificer of the unsignified signifier who reacts to the absurdity with humor - what would I call it. Like, the Baudrillardian Clown? Or something?
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