Whatcha Watchin'?

6 Likes

Weā€™ll probably know by the end of the movie. Sheā€™s certainly nailed that certain sadistic charm.

Nomi : Two years, so stay in your lane. You get in my way, I will put a bullet in your knee. The one that works.

Fairly low in the credits, though.

3 Likes

Probably sheā€™ll blame her psychopathy on PMS.

2 Likes

Shit. Iā€™m watching S8 E2 of Murder She Wrote, and so far the entire episode is ā€œJessica Fletcher deals with sexist BS from multiple vectors.ā€

Thereā€™s a guy whoā€™s a superfan taking her course and being a creep because he thinks she owes him something. Thereā€™s a fellow prof who interrupts her lecture to challenge her to solve a series of campus muggings as an ā€œacademic exerciseā€. And the dean admits she was only hired as a stunt to drive up admissions.

I loved how she shut down the ā€œacademic exerciseā€ prof, telling him those who do things just to prove themselves somehow never succeed.

Then thereā€™s the female student who begs her to investigate the muggings ā€“ although itā€™s never said, the implication is the officials wonā€™t take the attacks seriously (and sheā€™s right).

Oh, the creep just showed up again while Jessica was in the library stacks. Iā€™d forgotten how threatening those gigantic, underpopulated university stacks can be.

11 Likes

I only vaguely remembered this episode (despite bingeing the entire series earlier this year). Murder, She Blogged to the rescue with a great recap (as always).

4 Likes
2 Likes

Harley Muthafuckin Quinn:

Seriously though, NOT for kids, NSFW.

I fluv it.

6 Likes

Pet peeve time:

Iā€™m up to MacGyver Season 2, episode 20. ā€œFriendsā€.

Itā€™s one of those ā€œwe need to make this cheap, so film somewhere nondescript and re-use as much previous footage as possibleā€ episodes. Which in this case (like many, many others) translates to ā€œmain character has a mid-life crisis and takes more or less the entire episode ā€˜rememberingā€™ all the previous episodesā€.

30 minutes in, and I think thereā€™s been less than 10 minutes of original footage. Iā€™d skip to the next episode, except that these kinds of episodes usually at least have some kind of payoff near the end, so Iā€™m just fast-forwarding through the recycled footage while cursing them for putting so much recycled footage in.

Almost every show seems to have them, and itā€™s got to be the absolute bottom-of-the-barrel plot to write an episode around.

[edit] Aaaaaaandā€¦ not even a payoff at the end, just 3 minutes of another ā€œmemoryā€, and a throwaway joke. *sigh*


The next episode has the horribly cliche ā€œmain character has temporary amnesiaā€ plot that a previous episode in the show has already had (weā€™re only in season two, folks!)ā€¦ But, it has a bonus of having Star Trek DS9ā€™s Major Kira in it!
ā€¦argh, but itā€™s also another excuse for a recycled footage episode.

5 Likes

And itā€™s even worse than thatā€¦ this episode has absolutely the stupidest bad guy plan Iā€™ve ever seen.

Bad guy has a good guy whoā€™s lost his memory, but is slowly remembering some of it. Heā€™s worried that the good guy might have gotten information about his scheduled Bad Guy Plotā„¢ to his friends, but the good guy has confirmed to him, directly, that he doesnā€™t remember when the plotā€™s supposed to happen or any details but a fuzzy idea of the location. So, heā€™s in the clear, right? Shoot the good guy (with no witnesses, even!), carry out the plot, no problems!

ā€¦no. Instead, he tries to pretend to be the amnesiac good guyā€™s boss, while showing the good guy pictures of his actual boss and giving him other details about his actual life. And tries to convince the good guy to take out his actual boss. Sure, heā€™s mixing in fake details, but still. If the good guy canā€™t remember the things that might hurt you, why would you give him things that might viscerally jog his memory?!?! I feel like this is even worse than the ā€œput the good guy in a death trap and leave without shooting him or seeing him dieā€ thing, since heā€™s actively being helpful to the person who could stop him.

This show is so nostalgic for me, but watching these two episodes back to back is killing me.

3 Likes

I just binged Unbelievable, mainly because Iā€™m a huge Toni Colette fan. The acting in this is so good. Merit Weaver steals the show with a totally understated performance.

THIS is what we get when women get a voice. Produced, written, and directed by women. There is a big question hanging Not resolved, so, season 2 in the works?

8 Likes

OMG itā€™s everywhere on TV, and there are NO diseases, drugs, or brain injuries that make that happen

Anybody so impaired they donā€™t know who they are would be incapable of speaking or standing up

4 Likes

Related: there was an episode in the first season with the amnesia thing brought on by a drug. It didnā€™t end up being a re-aired footage episode, but it did end up being a drug with an incredibly precisely-timed death clock, with the amnesia wearing off at a very precisely-timed point well before the death clock ran out. As an interrogation drug, if you were able to time things out to the minute, sureā€¦ but then again, if youā€™re interrogating someone, why would you want to give them hours of temporary amnesia before an extremely short window before death?

Even with the show being generally built around the ā€œignore the silly points of the plot, pay more attention to the somewhat-plausible ways he gets out of itā€, that one was a bit of a stretch.

3 Likes

Very enjoyable. Daniel Craigā€™s performance is wonderful.

6 Likes

Great movie with a twisty plot! Looking forward to Craigā€™s career post-Bond.

4 Likes

I just started watching the Movies That Made Us a Netflix nostalgia doco about the making of iconic films like Dirty Dancing, Die Hard and Ghostbusters.

So far, so good.

4 Likes

The Expanse is back, still very Babylon 5 but now with a little Prometheus mixed in

5 Likes

I still need to watch season 3. And listen to the most recent book of the seriesā€¦

2 Likes

Ep 1 of the new season was great. some beautiful character moments. and they released it as a bingeable season this time, instead of week-by-week, if thatā€™s something that interests people.

2 Likes

And now that the mood has been set:

Spookies (1986) Dir: Eugenie Joseph, Brendan Faulkner and Thomas Doran

A boy has run away from home on his 13th birthday and winds up at a deserted mansion (surrounded by a cemetery) where he discovers a surprise party laid out for him. Meanwhile, two unrelated carloads of revelers also arrive, looking for a place to party. Little do they realize that the mansion also houses a necromancer who plans to use their lives to revive his dead wife (who doesnā€™t seem to actually be dead?)

Marvelously incoherent. The kind of thing that you usually find in Italian horror films of the period (albeit with more gore and nudity), but as Night Ranger sang just a couple years before ā€œYou Can Still Rock In Americaā€ and these guys do. Cobbled together from at least two attempts to get the film off the ground and allegedly the winner of a well-deserved Delirium award.

The video box art may ring a bell:

2 Likes

I was concerned that would be one of those Best Of our Faves types of things - all fluff and nostalgia. Iā€™ll give it a shot.

Iā€™m mainlining Jane The Virgin right now. I am on Season 2.

Itā€™s very similar to Ugly Betty - obviously Telenovela has certain tropes. Ugly Betty had stronger actors in it.

The first season was a little spotty but I expected that. I know it takes some time for shows to get their legs about them.

I do like the view into writing that it gives, and appreciate some of the risks they take with how they use the writing/texting/chatting/graphics and narration to add a kind of overlay to the showā€™s actions. It also sometimes detracts from the action so I feel I canā€™t get caught up in the drama of it all.

As it gets into season 2, I feel like the actors are able to show more range and that the writers were able to give them some fun elements to riff on.

The baby arrives in season 2 and I do think they do a good job of showing some of the challenges of motherhood without totally bogging the show down in diapers and breast milk. It was nice to see some of the difficult elements of motherhood navigated in with the drama.

I love how there is such strong female casting and women getting to play lots of different strong roles, from cop to hotel executive to moms and grandmas to actress.

Overall I rate it as a good show to watch while Iā€™m sick and needing something in short bingeable pieces. It sort of makes me miss Ugly Betty though.

1 Like