at the end of the day it was basically 8 episodes of Tales From the Crypt and that was just fine. I would say the weird anti-sex stance was ill-considered but did indeed fade away after a few episodes. The guy who played Elliot in ET was good at being incredibly pathetic, which was a lot of fun.
Yeah this absolutely feels out-of-touch in this exact way. No teeth at all. I love Glass Onion as a detective story but it’s got nothing really interesting to say politically, and neither did Usher.
it’s the new brand of netflix inclusion where they let people be gay incidentally but the writing isn’t very good, so again it has no teeth. I don’t have a problem with letting The Gays just exist in media, that’s nice and affirming and i genuinely appreciate being seen and normalized. It’s just like…boring as hell. And definitely doesn’t understand the politics of queerness in the least.
Everyone’s allowed to be gay as long as they’re also beautiful.
EDIT: this all sounds damning but i enjoyed this the most out of the three “House” Mike Flanagan whatever shows. Hill House was cowardly and had some sort of aspiration towards being life-affirming and it drove me crazy. Bly Manor was pretty good (and colorful) but the ending was basically a messy allegory for depression and ended with (cw self harm and spoilers) depression turns you into a bad person and you should kill yourself so I sort of hated that. This one is just like, cheesy fun where some hot people do stupid shit and die. Hard to dislike.
Somehow, incredibly, I have watched every other Columbo multiple times but had never seen the Columbo movie The Last Salute to the Commodore because I simply mistook it for “Dead Weight” which is a story about a war hero and I thought the name sounded like it belonged to that episode.
Anyway it is an amazing artifact of Patrick McGoohan and Peter Falk’s excess. McGoohan is in lots of episodes but this one he simply directs and it definitely feels like off balance weirdness of The Prisoner in full force compared to the other ones he directs. An absolute quirk fest. Tons of Columbos have a non plot relevant scene they cut out of the cable airings where his car breaks down or he’s waiting in line at the DMV or whatever and the whole thing comes to a halt so Falk can do his schtick (which I love), but this is an episode comprised of 90% that energy. I thought that 90s episode where he stops to do a five minute tuba solo was wild but this shit is incredibly loose. It feels like everyone involved was day drinking for the entire shoot. Columbo is truly cuddling and hugging and squeezing up on Richard Vaughn (and really the whole cast) the entire time. Multiple characters have insane Dark Souls laughter. Endless scenes of characters just like looking at each other smiling and sprawling out and shuffling around and repeating lines over and over and over again. The guy who directs a ton of those Adam Sandler movies plays a new young sidekick detective character whose name is Theodore Albinsky and goes by Mac and Columbo asks him if he’s got any Scotch or Irish family over and over and over and at the end he buys his own raincoat to be just like Columbo. There is a very long and drawn out scene of yelling over power tools. Columbo and the cops are shuffling five letters around to figure out what they mean and giggling over the word ASS like Beavis and Butthead.
The movie has a twist to the usual story where the villain actually dies halfway through and it slowly turns into an Agatha Christie drawing room whodunnit and after he solves the crime it doesn’t freeze frame and we don’t even see the guy get arrested or anyone react to him being caught. We just jump cut to Columbo and the other cops just leaving and Columbo hops in a rowboat and rows away four like four real time minutes.
This was supposed to maybe be the finale of the show and man it is fucking surreal. A terrible episode of Columbo but incredibly compelling television.
Has anyone watched the Japanese 90’s version of Columbo called “Furuhata Ninzaburo”?
Someone fansubbed all of them including the specials and uploaded them to nyaa a couple of years ago and I don’t think they were available in English anywhere before that.
The mysteries aren’t always up to Columbo levels but it’s got real serious 90’s TV energy and a lot of the killers are TV personalities/comedians, so it’s fun to watch them break character to play psychopaths. In one episode SMAP, playing themselves, murder someone and go up against Furuhata.
I watched the first episode of the 2000 J-Drama Ikebukuro West Gate Park the other day (it’s on Netflix now, oddly enough). I’ve heard that show was a major inspiration on the Yakuza games, and I can already see the similarity.
I mean, even in the first episode the main character is encountering comical Side Stories in the middle of the serious main plot. Like, you can almost hear the little steel guitar riff as he walks into a side quest. Dude randomly gets into a bowling challenge against a comedically self-serious stranger in a business suit, beats him, and wins a fancy car that he then drives around for the rest of the episode as he wastes time with his buds. You’ve gotta love that! Huge hangout energy in this show.
Watching it, I noticed that it has really similar editing and humor to another year 2000 J-Drama I’ve been watching lately, Trick. This low-budget feel with frenetic jump cut edits and quirky characters showing up for one gimmick and then leaving. I was like, “is this just what J-Dramas were like in the early 2000’s?” But then I looked it up and to my shock, both shows were directed by the same guy in the same year! Both are great too.
I love IWGP. I remember the director of the Yakuza games saying the model of Kiryu is based on the main guy and Majima is based off King, as is their best frenemies dynamic. Great performance from Watanebe Ken too. The ending is 100% pure early RGG.
It might be a little tame for SB but my favorite 90s J-Drama is still Long Vacation, starring Kimura Takuya. It’s just sort of a meandering love story about college hot dropouts but the vibes are immaculate.
My wife wants to know what everyone on this forum thinks about this movie, Marketa Lazarová. Please watch it and get back to me so I can get back to her.
On episode 6 of Midnight Mass, this is definitely the best show that I’ve seen by Flanagan. I love that it’s a pretty straightforward vampire story with a healthy dose of teenage religious philosophy. It’s like an adult version of Are You Afraid of the Dark? or Goosebumps.
Even if it doesn’t stick the landing, it’s had several character arcs that have already resolved so that’s fine. The endings of both Ep 5 and 6 were killer.
am half-way through it, getting reminded of other works like Solaris and Spirited Away and Prospect (which I think fell short of its potential). the scenes with a lot of tension keep making me expect a lot more gore
enjoying the extremely strong theme about the parallels of parasitism + social/emotional connection & the value/worthlessness of mundane ritual tasks, a bit less enthused by the monster-of-the-week set pieces. the witch in the woods was great for the symbiosis/harmony theme, didn’t care for revealing why she doesn’t speak. still 11/10
Kris and crew just landed, they seem like more assholes, good
baffled by the background behind this, I look at staff’s previous works and it’s stuff like Big Mouth??
I also found the witch in the woods stuff a bit disappointing, but it didn’t really detract from anything.
I love how interested this show is in its ecosystem, they’ll spend a quarter of an episode on a weird flower containing a tiny frog with a lifespan of one minute.
We were joking about how this wonderful series will get canned in favor of another season of Big Mouth, so seeing some of the same staff broke my brain a bit. Titmouse has a very very broad and varied catalog at this point, but even so, this is so radically different than their other ongoing series.
Happy to see Chris Prynoski on the staff, creator of such as Motorcity and Megas XLR. I guess he’s founder and head of Titmouse now? Cool.
… add to that borderline inappropriate romcom-bits, 30+ year old animu clichés (yeaaah, typical J-drama fare, i hear you), and voilá, there we are:
The cringe is strong with this show, and you wonder how the boomer leads fell so far from grace to end up in a, uh, triple-C show like this (had to double check but it indeed is Ryosuke Hirasawa, guess she isn’t on the A-list anymore ).
Recommended because they don’t make 'em like this anymore… for a good reason!
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