episode 3 Hotel Reverie I just did not connect with. Dumb script and plot holes, but mostly because Issa Rae’s performance was just terrible. Which is a shame because Emma Corrin was AMAZING!
episode 4 Plaything - Peter Capaldi fuck yeah! And what a treat for Warp Records fans! Autechre, µ-Ziq and Future Sound of London on the soundtrack! The Orb, Aphex Twin, Autechre, Artificial Intelligence, and Polygon Window record covers in the background! 90’s IDM forever, baby, especially now that everyone’s dead!
I enjoyed this actually, i felt invested in the relationship while watching it and the setting was reasonably authentic but i suppose it falls apart the more one thinks about it, and i was expecting the inevitable backlash of a black actor in the lead role to be a plot point yet they did nothing with it. Emma Corrin really is incredible though, i could fully buy into the idea she was a 1940s actress.
Plaything kept me hooked throughout, but its vision of a future UK just felt too close to home to fully enjoy it - absolutely plausible there would be a Bio-Identity Act and facial recognition everywhere in service of a central state-run computer system. Ugh. Not that the authentically grim period details from the mid 90s were any better.
I thought Eulogy could be added to the Black Mirror episodes that offer a benefit of technology but i still can’t help thinking about all that guy’s memories being uploaded to the company’s servers and getting mined for all their worth. Ignoring that, it is a very moving episode about exploring the kodachrome ghosts of old photos. Really enjoyed this.
I mean….hundreds, probably thousands, of people other than JK Rowling worked on the original Harry Potter and in the new upcoming adaptation, but I can promise you I’m not devoting a second of my viewing time to it. These decisions (death of the artist and all that) are pretty personal. I don’t think it’s appropriate for you to tell someone else what they can do.
Just saw the movie Sinners tonight with my partner. Directed by Ryan Coogler, it’s a vampire movie that takes place in the south around the 1930s i think. Overall impression is that the movie is great, really enjoyed the acting, the music, and the character development is pretty solid. I have a couple of nitpicks where i left the movie could’ve done more but i still came away really loving it.
Ok I am very sorry! I see how that post came across as flippant and probably man-splainy.
I meant that speaking strictly from a boycott perspective, there are hundreds of creative people who worked on the show and are not the asshole, so I think it’s ok to support that.
But if you personally can’t bear to watch anything NG related ever again I TOTALLY UNDERSTAND and I’m not telling you what to do or not do!
Personally, Sandman has always meant a lot to me so I’m still excited about the show, and I’m not going to burn my box set of the comics, or any of the other NG books on my shelf. I don’t know if I’ll be rereading them anytime soon though… and I noticed Pussycat put the Death tee shirt I bought her several years ago in the donation bin recently…
Look, it’s hard. I was a huge Jos Wheadon fan too. It sucks! But I think I can still be a huge Buffy/Angel/Firefly/Dollhouse fan, because so many other creators helped make those shows.
I was so into The Nevers and the fact that they buried the second season is I think unfair to everyone involved in the production and everyone who loved it. I understand - it was toxic by association. But I still wanna see it because I was so in love with the characters and the world!
Which makes me think about this: These stories, these fictional people and places that we have loved all this time, they aren’t the guy who did or said or believed the terrible things. They exist only in our minds. If you find out later on the writer was a terrible person sure it’s disappointing, but the story in your heart isn’t him, and you don’t have to give that up if don’t want to.
Yeah I get that. It’s the whole death of the author thing. And it can be a very personal decision. Just to discuss the one most relevant to me, I will not, and cannot, watch or read any Harry Potter anything any more. JK Rowling is still alive. Her anti-trans beliefs have only gotten worse since she first started voicing them, and governments all over the world are passing, or at least trying to pass, all kinds of anti-trans legislation. And it’s made me take a good hard look at Harry Potter and notice a lot of problematic elements I missed or brushed off as no big deal before, like the goblin bankers and the enslaved elfs.
Now I’m not saying Sandman is in the same category, but this shit is complex, and people have to make their own decisions. And what’s right for you isn’t going to be the right decision for someone else.
Here is more discussion on the show Adolescence and how it relates to the 80s-90s skinhead films, specifically the film Made in Britain starring a young Tim Roth… spoilers for both… But I have to say, the best skinhead film is, I think, This is England, which Stephen Graham is in, specifically because it does a better job of showing the relationship between racist political parties and skinhead culture - which is one of appropriation, not of inevitability of the white working class being racist nobs.
We know that the BNP sought to weaponize the violence associated with skinhead culture, and that they tried to completely co-opt punk, too (which largely failed, and ended up with people with white supremacist leanings tending to associate with the newly racist skinhead movement instead)…
Either way the overlap in the skinhead films (and the themes of these films) and this show is intriguing and worth thinking about.
