yeah I think she’s what you call “canny,” she somehow parlayed being like, an extremely mainstream and demographically normative actress into all these serious directors really wanting to work with her and getting great anchor performances out of her. she’s like, better than straight down the middle is supposed to get you
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She rules
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once yorgos got her I became glad she is in movies again
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Two episodes into Fall of the House of Usher. Despite strong the strong Netflix aura, I actually really liked Midnight Mass. This show, however, is really offputting so far. I am fretting watching even another more.
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Episodes two and three are the worst, imo. This is definitely Flanagan’s worst Netflix series, I think.
watched all of (up-to-now) The Morning Show, Jennifer Aniston/Reese Witherspoon’s Apple+, Morning TV version of Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom where in Season 1 (2019) they’re reckoning w/ Steve Carrell as Matt Lauer getting Metooed w/ Aniston as Katie Couric & Witherspoon as a less problematic/more unknown Megyn Kelly analogue. Dull but fine.
Season 2 (2021) is somehow a little worse because they get distracted by: the promise of getting to have a Covid plot, Carell and Billy Crudup clearly being the most interesting performances on a show that’s supposed to be about women, trying 2 snap back at critiques of the show very obviously being written from/for an unintentionally racist white liberal attitude that sees itself as progressive – none of this is handled well.
Anyways, Season 3 the showrunner changed and now the show has entirely gone off the deep end w/ Jon Hamm as Don Draper isekai’d into an Elon Musk parallel (“Paul Marks”). Tig Notaro is there for some reason as his assistant, Greta Lee is given much more to do as an old coworker of his, cast regular Mark Duplass fades away but not as much as Shari Belafonte who exclusively gets to give a look every other episode but has at most like 1-2 words in an episode.
Also, the actor in season 1 and 2 who’s sole role was complaining about getting sidelined by media and not getting a chance to grow because he’s black, gay, and educated and therefore does not fit within an easy narrative was written off the show entirely without his knowledge (as was a bunch of supporting cast).
The show keeps starting to suggest a complicity and psychological plummet for Aniston & Witherspoon from their desire for/wielding of increased power but is too sentimental, swayed by narcissism (& indebted to them as producers?) to ever fully commit and always pulls back into justifying their selfishness as aiming towards heroic ends. So they’re quickly the least interesting characters in a show where the writing is not doing the heavy lifting.
To the show’s credit, Crudup is clearly having fun playing what can be best described as a soulful white boy(he sang “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” on the piano in the latest episode) & this latest season is promising poor taste of a higher caliber than ever (Witherspoon’s character caught her alcoholic brother in the January 6th riots after their mother died of covid and deleted the footage so he wouldn’t go to jail). So unfortunately I can’t deny that “I’ll keep drinking that garbage”
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Any time I hear anything substantive about apple+ I wonder anew how apple+ exists
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it’s funny because like, if you thought Netflix or Prime Video producers were too on the nose,
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I know apple has infinite money but it’s gotta be a loss leader for… something…?
culver city real estate
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I’ve been watching Apple + or TV or whatever it is called shows recently while exercising as I got 6 months free for some reason (maybe with the PS5?) and like… there seems to be fine stuff on it but not enough to build an entire steaming platform around? Severance was neat, Silo was a shockingly big budget departure from a book I read years ago because my sister told me to and the first season of Ted Lasso is… comfortable viewing but I think I may actually run out of stuff I want to watch on it before the free trial period runs out.
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Ted Lasso kept a lot of people subscribing
Apple TV+, Peacock, and Paramount Plus are all in the category of services I intend to subscribe to only for the free trial period or one (1) month so we can watch one particular show but then up accidentally paying for for half a year without using them.
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it’s kind of annoying that a company as evil as amazon has probably the best streaming service for tv shows and movies
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three episodes in and The Fall of the House of Usher is so far avoiding the problem of doing nasty things to likable people by not having any at all. If this turns into a “sympathy for billionaires” thing i’m gonna chuck a brick through Mike Flanagan’s window.
It’s really weird about sex so far. All on screen sex stuff has been showed as the purvey of wealthy people with no boundaries doing either actually gross or just “gross” stuff. Definitely pinging my radar as far as Horror That Hates Sex And Also The Queers goes. But i’m intrigued.
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I had a problem with the House of Usher that I also had with Glass Onion—the fuck-the-wealthy, who cares what bad things happent to them feels too much like reading Twitter in 2021. The rich people are so fully unlikable it just feels like a cheap political cartoon to me.
At its worst. There are definitely things I like about it.
I think the show is trying to be inclusive wrt queerness (I know Flanagan’s wife Kate Siegel is bi, and I know Flanagan has quite a few queer actors in his stable of regulars) but the way the actual sex in the series is being had seems to align it with the immoral excesses of the ultrarich, so those first couple episodes especially made me feel a little like it was, at best, accidentally queerphobic, idk. That became less an issue as the show went on, as there was also less sex in general.
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do they use karate and weaver or some exaggerated 60s cop show squatting isosceles gun stances in that john wick spin off show or do they take the coward route and just fight like they do in the wick movies
im treating it like the longest Treehouse of Horror episodes possible and that’s working just fine after 2 more episodes
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equilibrium would’ve been actually good if all the gun kata looked as dorky as this
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Imagine doing a House of Usher show and not casting r & b legend Usher in a lead role
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