looks like you were the true detective
it was weird talking to people i worked with in 2014 about this show – to hear them tell it, it was a badass rugged cop story instead of, idk, an oscillating moody/campy zen pulp series
i didn’t watch it for a bit after that. i think my boss had a big hug mug and used it for coffee
my dad absolutely liked it because damn this is fucked up…i hope these cool but fucked up cop men can solve the crime…and because hes gay for matthew mcconaughey something about the cast of season 2 made him profoundly disappointed. i think you and I both know that sad Colin Farrell is much more fuckable anyway but my dads homosexualism is definitely too weak to see that, and so true detective went in the trash bin so he could watch more ray donovan (hes gay for liev schreiber too in case your keeping score). some times i just think about when my dad was looking at a picture of him on Google images on his tvs web browser and being like … Wow …hjes such a handsome man …
trying to figure out where i’ve seen schreiber’s face recently and figured out the only thing i’ve seen him in is x-men origins wolverine during our x-men marathon earlier this year (lol)
rust is charming until they go to his place and reveal he’s a no-tv pull-up-bar guy from 2014
otoh i know what farrell looks like without that mustache
im mainly sorry someone outside of 2008 had to watch X-Men Origins Wolverine tbh. You deserve justice.
hes always somewhere between crockett and padraic in my minds eye lately
hey like I said on discord, t bone burnett is legit he just sometimes misses and true detective was like 60% miss
the big lebowski soundtracks are worth it for the occasional true detective
I just…
Some people simply cannot be helped.
oh I was being kind of facetious im just making fun of this particular musical blind spot of his and rust cohles special dead ladies looking at mixtape. im sure hes fine
was hoping Behind Your Touch, the netflix k-drama about a psychic veterinarian who solves mysteries by reading the minds of dogs would be a cute fluffy distraction but the third episode is gross trans panic bullshit
How To with John Wilson is extremely good and extremely for me
after a long, long time of mediocre k-shows, neflix has doled out a new contender that is worth of being recommended:
Mask Girl, 7 episodes.
Each episode seems to focus on at least one aspect/cliché you have seen many times before, and makes an unexpected move - either by not following the established rulebook, by doubling down and overdoing it, or taking a wild turn.
Guess this is why i love it so much so far, thought i knew where it wants to go a few times already and had a great time watching it dole out snarky tidbits at society/role models/expectations and, i guess, at moi as well, the consumer that expects a certain product (and doesn’t get what you’d expect).
Recommended!
can confirm:
Mask Girl is a ‘def Watch’ recommendation, a rare case of a korean show that manages to stick to its strenghts, having/landing a great ending, having a great cast, mixing multiple genres and never feeling like it is dragging its feet.
alas, you can recommend then for 2023 so far:
‘Decision to leave’ for k-movie,
Mask girl for k-series .
i watched the first episode of taberu dake because mariko goto of midori is in it…shes just acting generally kind of weird which i expected but overwhelmingly it seems like a vehicle to film her eating erotically eating food which i was not necessarily prepared for. she eats a rice ball so vigorously it made me slightly uncomfortable
the first episode was about a fail guy with 3 ex wives who are driving him to suicide because child support because women suck i guess? and he eats udon with mariko goto while she doesnt really say anything at all and makes weird frog faces at everything. whenever anyone eats anything on this show i get jump scared because its 2 inches away from the camera and GROSS
anyway when he gets home he tells his rice cooker about how “elegant exciting and a bit erotic” she is to be around so i dont know if ill be watching episode 2…but it really does live up to the title of JUST EATING
Two episodes in to the third and final Reservation Dogs season… If they can keep it up and stick the landing this may end up being the best show I’ve ever seen . I know it’s been acclaimed but it still feels very underappreciated
Finished watching the netflix Haunting of Hill House show, and it’s one of the most cowardly pieces of media I’ve ever encountered. I didn’t expect it to be as good as, or even similar to, the book. But with the like, 95% fresh rating and rave reviews from viewers, I thought it would be like…not extremely frustrating?
I want to lay out as much of this as I can. The premise is that a family moves into a house in the uh, 80’s I think. And one night, some really really bad shit goes down. Now 20+ years later, all the surviving members of the family are miserable and haunted by various ghosts, both literal and figurative.
The first 8 episodes are mostly about setting up Evil House, in between familial drama. It does this via liberal time-hopping, and it’s very good at keeping this up. Scenes are tied together thematically and episodes tend to focus on one character to keep things straightforward. And it goes a long way to show the deleterious effect even being in this house has. It’s successful in this! And it has some really great episodes.
The one with the funeral is an all-timer for me, capturing perfectly the awkwardness inherent to death, the gracelessness that people handle it with, and how disastrous it can be to a group of people. It also does this faux single-take thing that I found incredibly distracting, but otherwise I thought it was great.
Also, the reveal that Nell (poor Nell) was haunting herself throughout time was really good. Like, it’s just absolutely miserable in this really resonant and cool way. There are several moments like this but that’s definitely the coolest reveal. And it speaks a lot to the both literal and figurative non-linearity of time. Humans live as much in their memories and hopes and fears as they do the present, and this is just more literally true for ghosts.
The thing that is very clear for the first 8 episodes is that becoming a ghost in the house sucks so bad. It’s so bad. Constant delusion and torture and confusion. It’s bad!! I cannot emphasize how bad it is to be a ghost in this house.
Anyway, the last two episodes are really fucking frustrating. Episode 9 is the big reveal of what happened on a certain night in the past. This takes the show from “Ghosts are a sort of ephemeral presence and the house is really the issue” to “Ghosts will tell you to kill your children, and then you’ll try to kill your children.” I hate how literal this is - just let things be vague! It also takes time to lay out origins for like, half of the ghosts, which is like. Why? I don’t need this level of detail.
Then the last episode is just like, the most cowardly shit I’ve ever seen. All the family is in the house again, and it’s trying to digest them. It does this by uh, giving them hallucinations and then explaining the origin stories for every previously unexplained ghost that’s been in the show in fairly great detail. Very annoying.
And the last 15 minutes are the fucking deal breaker for me. It becomes this thing about how the mother and her one dead kid are trapped in this house, but it’s not that bad actually. And the dad sacrifices himself and is also in the house, and that’s fine it’s all fine. And it ends by showing the very literal mechanics of how the house works - if you die in the house, you become a ghost. That’s it. You don’t have to live in the house for a long period of time, there’s no corruption, none of that. You die there, you’re a ghost now. Congrats.
And this is all supposed to be a good thing!! Like something about a family united through time, and all this shit, and it’s gross! Like, be brave enough to have a bad ending or even a mixed ending. Who demanded that this show (which is for the record not family friendly) have this sappy, undermining ending???
(I imagine the higher ups at netflix tbh)
The show opens with the famous opening lines from the book, specifically:
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
This sets up the themes for the book and show perfectly. Whatever walked there, walked alone, There is no connection, no family, no dignity in this house. It is a bad place.
And then at the very end, they repeat this, except they change the last line to:
…whatever walked there, walked together.
Excuse me??
Anyway, I fucking hated this show at the end, which is really frustrating because the first 8 episodes were a perfectly fine B+ to A- affair. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about how much it frustrated me since then. Cannot recommend it.
i just found out that the guy who directed this also directed one of my favorite movies, Oculus, which more perfectly captures all the vibes this show was going for in under 2 hours. baffled as usual.
Watched Elephant in the Living Room, a documentary on amazon prime about people keeping exotic pets. Was a huge bummer seeing this dude in Texas with a litter of lion cubs in a horse trailer, also the dudes in favor of exotic pets for whome endangering others is the freedom that it means to be american was another huge bummer.
If you are in the ‘normal romcom just doesn’t do it anymore for me’ camp (yes, me as well) … well, you may like this netflix show ‘A Time Called You’:
How does a timetravel-body-possession-horror-whodunnit-highschool-university-romcom sound?
Yep, exactly up my alley as well, and too good to be perfect.
Supposedly a remake that seems to dip a bit often into accidental horror territory (for an innocent highschool romcom, that is), though that was a nice change/balanced out the sugar-coated lovey-dovey kitsch that inevitably had to come along as well.
Recommended!
I woke up last night to one of the many apparent Walking Dead spin-offs and I couldn’t believe how bad it was – it has to be written by AI at this point. There’s a scene where they were breaking into an old gym to find a character’s boyfriend or some shit, and they break the window to the front door which is crowded by zombies and then hold off a bunch of zombies with a table after they get in and then they’re like, “our only option is to retreat to this boxing ring” and it’s like, what the fuck are you even talking about? Why was getting into the boxing ring at the center of the room and trapping yourself the only option? You had no trouble getting passed all of these things when you broke into the building. And then some guy that looks like the lead singer from the Spin Doctors but with Dr. Loomis’ awful facial scar make-up from Halloween 4/5 comes and saves the day and they shoot all of the zombies to some song for like, 3 minutes. Also, for some reason, there’s a yellow fog engulfing the world and they keep shifting to a camera focus on their eyes or from their point of view from their goofy masks. How are these even still being made? Somebody needs to get some telenovela writers to write up a good zombie soap opera.
And I keep seeing commercials for some Daryl Dixon spin-off that looks like some gray Game of Thrones-ass nonsense. I’m pretty sure I saw a chunks of it while in the hospital and nothing happened (though I couldn’t see much, but I could still tell). How is it a decade+ old franchise still has only one singular character anybody gives a shit about?
I guess I’m not really surprised that these are still bad – the Walking Dead was always bad, even the comics were awful (“How am I supposed to tell my kids there won’t be a fuckin’ SANTA this year!?”). Losing Frank Darabont should’ve killed this whole thing before it started.
emma stone’s filmography at a glance at this point is a little bananas