Whatcha Watchin'?

I’m still waiting for this.

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one of the best things is since I need reading glasses any spoilers you offer will look like this text, and I will refuse to focus on it!

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It’s like 30 miles, which even with crazy Johnson County drivers takes 45 minutes or so.

30 miles is a different drive depending on where you are in the country. In the Plains states or the Southwest, it’s your kids’ commute to school, or your drive to WalMart if you’re lucky. In bigger cities like NYC, LA, Chicago, and Houston, you’re still in the burbs after 30 miles. If you’re in Boston, it’s “OMG, you’re going to [place 30 miles away]? Did you book a hotel room for the night?”

This stuff always confuses me. In TV shows, anything with a Midwestern-sounding name is portrayed as really remote and backwoodsy. I’ve seen this apply to places like Des Plaines IL (in Cook County where Chicago is) and Evergreen Park IL (95th and Kedzie, in Chicago). Don’t writers of these shows 1) know how to use maps, and 2) realize that people watching their shows live in these places?

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I was really not sure who she was supposed to be. I could make guesses based on appearance, but with her, it wasn’t so much the character as that it wasn’t a character to her, but a real-life persona that she felt spiritually attached to. She was her in-ring persona. There was something about that that just… got to me… on some level.

Also, I remember the drama between Liberty Belle and Vicky The Viking as being something based on real-life events… and having occurred many times before and since :expressionless:

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You’ve seen Tampopo? less cannibalism, still a great 80s food movie.

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I finished I Love Dick, which j’t’adore! Very artsy and very interesting commentary. Amazed something so alternative in content could get on Amazon.

Now I’m deep into Ozark which I’m pretty meh on (knock off of Breaking Bad and The Sopranos, only set in the Ozarks). One of my beefs with the show is that they use Southern accents and not midwestern accents. My dad is from the Ozarks and no one talks with that twang there. The accent is more flat. The Ozarks is a freakin’ weird place and I think they could have done a lot with it if they had actually captured the oddness of it better. Instead it’s sort of generic Hillbilly, which, uh, guys, that’s Appalachia.

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I’ve considered it, but am holding off for now. I’ll see it soon enough.

The Ozarks accent is kind of both

and neither at the same time. It’s the Bill Clinton accent, more or less. Sounds vaguely Southern but is closer to a Kansas accent than to any accent I consider Southern.

It’s also worth pointing out that hillbillies and rednecks are not the same people either.

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My dad is from Neosho, MO. Arkansas is a little different and this show is set at the Lake of the Ozarks, so I could see the accent being different there. My dad’s family, they definitely speak with a very particular accent that is not twangy.

The way he grew up is fascinating, especially when contrasted against the commercialism of the 50’s in other parts of the country.

Frankly, I find the area he grew up in pretty depressing.

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I like Springfield. Other than Springfield, that part of the country reminds me of this:

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:octopus::+1::dancer::rainbow::stars::fireworks::tada:

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This one is closer to how my family talks. If you look at the speakers, there seems to be some Native American features - we’ve had the discussion that in that area, pretty much everyone probably has some Indian blood in them somewhere.

  1. No
  2. If it’s outside California it’s not really real

What makes me laugh is when characters go to Vancouver/Montreal/Toronto and they’re portrayed as very small cities – maybe 50,000 people. Meanwhile they’re using one of those cities as their regular location shoot and it’s supposed to be LA, DC, NYC, or Chicago.

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The way the roads are laid out in Boston, if you don’t know them really well (GPS can’t even figure them out), you might drive 30 miles and still be just a block over from where you started.

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All of those Canadian cities are bigger than DC except Vancouver is slightly smaller. Toronto is bigger than Chicago and I think LA. Anything outside NYC and LA is apparently small and quaint to them. They see Canada as a cheap shooting location and nothing else.

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It doesn’t help matters any that each town has like three names, and like five unique street names that change every time you cross town borders.

That reminds me: back in the early days of the internet (before it was opened up for business use), I came across a rather snotty magazine article which pointed out some USENET forums were populated entirely with people from smaller, non-Ivy League universities, even gasp people from overseas.

The conclusion was that this international network thing wasn’t really that big a deal – it was a way for second- and third-tier institutions to feel special, when of course everyone knew all the really important stuff was happening in New York, Boston, LA, and San Francisco (+ any Ivy League schools not in those locations).

IMHO while all those places are still very popular (as witnessed by housing prices), they don’t have the cachet they once did. TV has been slow to catch on to this. So have films.

Now I want to see a film about an amazing visual artist who does everything on-line and lives modestly in a mid-sized town in Iowa.

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Coming soon: hell yeah!

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They probably foresaw that the web’s instant porn was going make USENET irrelevant and wanted to talk it down.

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Looks like I need to read that sooner rather than later!

I went to see this with my family today:

If I had to express my feelings about this movie in one character, it would be :slightly_frowning_face:.

If you want to watch a movie about a character who feels constrained by the role that society has chosen for them, starts an incident that threatens that society’s existence in a short period of time, and then resolves the conflict by being true to theirself, just watch this instead:

Also, my wife and I went to see this:

I didn’t know much about it going in. I didn’t, for example, know that it was based on a comic book. It’s clever, brutal, covers an under-served time period, and has a (mostly) fantastic soundtrack. Apparently some people are calling it gun-fu, but I think that is both reductive and underselling it.

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