I liked the part in monsieur spade where Audrey is passed out listening to Jacques brel and when the doctor turns off the music theres a little portrait of brel next to the record player
good show but I LOVE JACQUES BREL little sweaty belgian bastard
gotta find more fontana gold after this I’m running out
Haven’t really kept up with Always Sunny in Philadelphia since its sixth season in, uh, 2010. Have gotten caught up through the first 2 episodes of season 14 in the last, I think, 3 weeks. That’s a lot of Always Sunny at once! But man, I do enjoy the feel of this show, as awful as the characters usually are.
I was a bit worried they’d hit a downward slope around season 11, but then season 12 was mostly top-notch stuff. Later seasons are more uneven than the show’s best years (which I might define as seasons 3 through 9?), but its dips in quality are usually only temporary, an episode or three here and there, and unlike most shows that run for a long time, the problems haven’t been so close to the core of the show that they threaten my ability to enjoy it. They’ve still got a pretty good handle on the core dynamics and voice of the series and characters, even as they’ve evolved. And some of the less good episodes are wild swings that I may not like that much but respect that they’re still trying shit.
Howerton looks kinda surprisingly old starting around season 14. He’s not older than the other two guys in the main cast, but age seems to be hitting him the hardest (and being kindest to Charlie Day). It’s kinda wild to see.
Been thinking a lot about the observation Sleazy made some time ago that when the Christmas special ran in 2010, they censored out “fuck” but spoke the r-word out loud, but when they included a clip of the same scene like 8 years later, they aired “fuck” but censored the r-word.
Finished watching the new Sword and Fairy 1 series, which is the 3rd series based on this franchise released this year (S&F4 came out like a day before 6 I think, but on a rival platform).
I think I liked it more than 6, although it is pretty obviously an adaptation of a 10 - 15 hour game stretched out to 40 episodes of 45 mins each. They had to make some pretty major changes to the plot to fit the runtime, some of which work and some not so much (ie Ling’er gets separated and reunited with Xiaoyao like four times).
They added an extra character (at least I don’t remember him in the game) to be love interest to A’nu, but he spends almost the entire show looking like he’s trying to hold in the biggest fart.
One of the weird changes was in the first two eps, where they changed the circumstances around the two main characters’ marriage, in a way that to me seemed like some kind of attempt to get around censorship (they removed him pranking her while she bathes, and changed it from him being forced to marry her under pain of death to some weird time travel thing where his future self’s memories make him ‘remember’ his love for her ). Just seemed way more unnecessarily convoluted.
Then in the last two episodes suddenly they have to squeeze pretty much the entire Nanzhao portion of the plot, like the episode count got abruptly reduced during production or something*.
There was one bit where they are fighting a demon, and someone says something like “if you use the gluttonous bug, it will slow his movements” and now I am wondering if that’s a pro strat that works in the game.
Overall though, way more competently made than 6 was (although I enjoyed that as well). Not as much excessive green screen or overuse of pop ballads, and they actually seemed to understand lighting a bit better instead of just making everything look flat and bright like a sitcom.
*Apparently in China there’s a law about how many episodes a TV series can have per season (more eps equals more profits), and some productions have tried to exploit a loophole to get around this by labelling half the episodes ‘season 2’ and then airing them as normal without a gap between. But the law got changed so that there needs to be a gap between seasons of at least one year, and some dramas got caught in this and had to either delay half the episodes for a year or re-edit everything to fit the 40 ep limit.
okay I don’t care for the alien shit so much, I liked when he was just a nice weird guy.
Chicken Nugget (Netflix) — webtoon that got the silverscreen-treatment.
Plot:
girl is transformed into a Chicken Nugget and her dad + wanna-be lover try to transform her back, hijinx ensue.
Had to laugh a lot because this show knows the plot beats of its source material and subverts expectations to keep things fresh, zany comedy clicked more often than i thought, give it a try if you like to laugh.
sometimes jean smart’s suits on hacks remind me of the ferengi ones on ds9 they made out of patterned upholstery
somewhere out there a child is telling their ultra-religious parents that Young Sheldon gets baptized in the series finale of Young Sheldon, as part of a detailed argument as to why said child should now be allowed to watch the show… it has retroactively become the story of Young Sheldon finding the light
on this season of The Bear… tune in to see whether Carmy and friends can finally cook a single dish without having a nervous breakdown
… i do love this show and i know every show needs conflict, but if they don’t give these characters a moment of peace before it goes off the air …
yeah it’s gotten to the point where it’s so popular and critically acclaimed that there’s starting to be a bit of joking backlash to how high-key the whole thing is but I honestly love every minute of it
It just kinda feels depressing to watch, everyone is so miserable and every episode is full of relentless sadness
yeah i liked the first season more as it felt like a bunch of kind of fucked up people working really hard to create something together, even though none of them could agree about what that thing was even after they had created it.
the second season really dug in to carmy having deeply rooted psychological issues that seem just like… completely irresolvable without serious therapy lol. i mean they do a good job of depicting that (other than the romance subplot which i’ve complained about on here a lot in the past), but at a certain point it is just hard to watch. although, to their credit, i do think they give every other character much more meaningful growth and development, but that just makes it harder to handle when carmy just fucks everything up for all of them (for reasons that are still basically understandable and sympathetic, but still).
but that sort of stuff is still why i think its a pretty good show, despite being hard to watch a lot of the time. i mean i guess i don’t watch a whole lot of serious prestige tv so maybe they’re all like that. but i found the melodrama of this one a lot more compelling than like succession, which i tried but was sort of unmoved by despite being impressed by the actors and stuff. i guess… it is just hard to care about people who are that rich lol
The Bear could be this show about picking apart the neurosis that its characters are too deluded to notice themselves. Something like The White Lotus where the audience whispers to each other, her problem’s really that she is a liar herself and knows it. Most of the dramatic delight could be ironic like this. But it’s refreshing that its presentation and characters are so earnest. They know they have problems and sometimes their issues create conflict, but no one (at least in what I have seen) is trying to hurt anyone. It seems like an exception instead of a general archetype in this show when a character hangs onto an aspect of their ego for so long that it drags them and others into a mess of painful chaos. No one wants to keep suffering or to make others suffer like they have, most people are considerate. I called it earnest, and you know very well that this could have been some disturbingly and manipulatively honest mumblecore thing, but it’s remarkable that it isn’t that at all.
I never watched it in its heyday (I was too young, the show too horny, and even back then kid me figured it was corny as hell), but I caught the back end of an episode of Baywatch on the Roku channel that just shows Baywatch 24/7 and witnessed David Hasselhoff cut a big hole in a pipe that runs under the beach, pop in a little breathing cannister and swim under the sand towards a lifeguard tower to rescue two life guards being held hostage by a cackling gunman.
It wasn’t good, but it was some of the wildest shit I’ve ever seen, making it almost loop back around to be pretty damn good.
Watch baywatch nights season 2
I recommend the episode where medieval vikings get thawed out of some ice and rampage across socal
Or the episode where hasslehoff has to do a vr adventure game larp to solve a murder
i avoided los espookys because i did not want to look at fred armisen but fantasmas is so incredibly good that i guess i’m gonna have to eventually go back and watch it
THEN: “Dang, can’t stop thinking about David Hasselhoff swimming under the sand, wouldn’t it be funny if I watched this Baywatch pilot movie…as a goof…”
NOW: “Goddamn Hobie this is like the third murder you’ve stumbled upon or been loosely associated with, what the hell, you’re like ten.”
This show is dumb as hell, make no mistake, but I guess at least this first season seems like it had a budget, and is making an earnest attempt at establishing ongoing plot threads and elements and whatnot.
It was wild to see Madchen Amick as the psychotic stalker girl in the pilot, but maybe even wilder to see young baby David Spade and Mariska Hargitay show up in the last episode I watched.
It’s also weird given the “Remastered” version of the show, I guess? Read up on it and the rights holders established a team of like 200 people to comb through the episodes, clean the footage up as best they could (some scenes in this first season cut to what’s gotta be some half rotten SD tape, it’s pretty jarring), and reposition every single frame from 4:3 to 16:9.
They also didn’t want to spend a shitload of money figuring out the music rights, so they…built their own recording studio and got a bunch of small indie bands to record the corniest 90s songs imaginable? Because apparently building a studio and recording dozens? hundreds? of hours of music was like 10% of what it would have cost them to renegotiate using the old music.
I can’t believe I’m wasting my day off on this.
More effort being put into the Baywatch remaster than Silent Hill 2 or Lynch films…
God help me I keep looking into this. This Youtuber has a few videos about the Remasters, and it seems like they’re infinitely weirder than I had read.
The scenes where someone is about to start playing a song and it just cuts to the end are hilarious. Some of the other edits are bizarre (the whole bit with cutting to stock footage of sharks, including using different species of shark between the same scene).
The whole thing where they replace a scene of Hasselhoff and the kid’s teacher making out with two guys shooting a watermelon with a harpoon gun…what is this show…
Sounds like the only way to get the “true” Baywatch experience is to import the German Blu-ray box set. All these years later, Germany still about that Hasselhoff…
it’s a perfect correlation: germany loves being the only country with physical releases of english language tv shows, and germany loves hasselhoff.
hd seems to have been pretty bad for 90s tv in general, the hd version of buffy the vampire slayer has terrible fucked up colours
