@Gaagaagiins I can already tell season 4 is better because the theme song is great once again (and my man Dennis is king of the ring in episode 2)
Someone somewhere learned an important lesson in advertising because unlike whoever made the call in season 3 Microsoft knows you need to leave absolutely no room for doubt about what video game the kid is playing
Wowā¦ itās the Halo
This show is really good. Iām watching the Jackie Chan episode now.
i started watching game of thrones for the first time
Thatās cool
it lives up to the hype! iām at the end of season 4 right now. i love that itās making me unironically use the word epic again.
Are folks watching da bear? Find myself less than enamored with this season- wondering peoples thoughts. One of those seasons that makes you wonder if it was ever good.
itās bad and you are correct it was never good
I unfortunately got that feeling from the first bit of the second season and stopped watching it. Seemed like The Bear depended on some good casting, charming character tropes, and a pitch perfect use of Refusedās New Noise from The Shape of Punk To Come, which was proportional in goodness for a one-off season of television. But then the more you learn about it and spend time with it, the more shallow and predictable it seems to be.
After a certain point it all just comes off like this, over and over again:
Also I watched that Ripley show based on Timās recommendation on the podcast a little while ago. It was pretty damn good and Tim didnāt undersell just how good it looks, every frame a goddamned painting indeed. I dunno if it was high art narrative-wise but it was splendidly cast and, at least for me, maintained intrigue and tension while still being pretty stolidly paced.
It is marvelous as a period piece, unrelenting in how it is, looks, feels, and must be set in the 1950s, and its use of black and white only enhances all of that feeling. The technology and forensic investigation standards of the day are tightly wound around the plot itselfāI wouldnāt know because Iāve never read it but I imagine this signifies itās a highly faithful adaptation of the source material (that being The Talented Mr. Ripley, which Iām only familiar with as being the name of a 1999 movie with an extremely 1999 ensemble cast). Maybe that sounds like damning it with faint praise, but, you know, if I hadnāt already seen the guy who plays Tom Ripley, Andrew Scott, as Moriarty in the BBC Sherlock, I might feel inclined to believe they shot this by bringing black and white Hobbit cameras through a time machine.
At any rate even if the overall story doesnāt entirely dazzle, as Tim waxed on about, itās an incredible looking television show. Maybe Italy is just like this, but, I think itās most impressive feat is that, in a combination with the incredible composition of every shot, and the wacky angles of all the incredible architecture, but this show manages to make Italy look like Dark Souls and/or Bloodborne for a lot of it. You must watch this in 4K if you have a 4K display and just marvel at how the visual fidelity combined with the composition and lighting and everything makes just every distinct object or surface or texture or angle so exquisite to look at. Even down to the minute details of, like, the thickness of the glass of the ashtrays feels like it was obsessed over, if that sounds possible.
I could go into this from a local social dynamics perspective but that would be way to esoteric for general interest. But I can say that in addition to be self-important, repetitive, weepy, and kind of dumb, itās also really irritating in its attempts to ārepā the city
Well, you know, I certainly donāt consider myself to be a part of the āgeneral interest,ā if you felt so inclined
the creator of the show is from park ridge, which is an I would say universally disliked suburb owing to the reputation of its citizens for being overbearing snobs who sometimes consider themselves part of a city to which they neither geographically nor culturally belong (hillary clintonās hometown btw). The setting of the show is inspired by this one mr beef place down town and the creator having been friends with the owners son. So the place itself is in the kind of culturally and socially denuded downtown where suburbanites and tourists go in the mistaken belief that this is somehow representative of the wider city. Also note the suburban bourgeoise remove in "knowing the ownerās son. Coming from this is I think a predictable misrepresentation of yelling, swearing, and dysfunction for a kind of chicago white ethnic (itās totally unclear to me to what ethnicity anyone of the white characters is supposed to be) authenticity. The show is just totally transfixed with banal, repetitive arguments and is relentless in all kinds of dumb gimmicks to try to make this seem urgent (close ups, cuts to simmering pots (lmao), etc). Just as how the white characters have basically no legible cultural identity (itās the old snl cheeseborger cheeseborger people I guess?? Greek? Italian? Polish? but because they get emotional, have nicknames, and call eachother ācousinā I guess weāre supposed to buy it) the black and latino characters are likewise total blanks whose personalities are irreducible from the token āurban strugglesā the show briefly alights on then moves past (donāt have a degree, got laid off, single parent household, etc). And what the show moves past to, is a kind of embarrassingly obsequious and credulous worship of āfine diningā. That part in season three where they give all these mealy mouthed irl michelin starred chefs what feels like a million hours to congratulate themselves was unbelievable I mean come on. You may also note that Chicago did have a michelin star restaurant vogue that petered out about 7 or 8 years ago so idk why the goon making the show is getting around to it now and now I have to relive all that shit.
Ok youāve convinced me several times over, Iām a hater now too. Anything with that few degrees of separation from Hilary Clinton cannot be spiritually whole
I find it so interesting critics love to talk about how it reps Chicagoā¦ I feel like if you said they were making cheesesteaks you would realistically believe itās in Philly. Iām not from Chicago so maybe I miss some local shit, but there isnāt much color to the setting (in the show).
Appreciate the crits. Gonna take your word on the Chicago representation but for my part I really enjoyed the first two seasons, even when they got kinda silly (the scenes with Joel McHale come to mind). Still excited to watch the third!!
In the meantime Iāve been watching How To with John Wilson. Havenāt finished it yet (one episode to go) but itās one of my favorite shows Iāve seen in a while. Very easy on my brain. The last show I enjoyed totally uncritically like this was The Sopranos.
right itās color-graded drone shots confined to like a 2 mile radius in the downtown commercial district where people commute to work, but no one really lives. Doesnt look like the city or anywhere in particular. Canāt blame critics for remarking on the repping thing because the show is sweatily conspicuous about that. Has the kind of suburbanite-conceived specific non-specificity that would trick people who donāt know better
My reaction exactly. I rewatched the whole thing in anticipation of this season (which I also binged all the way through over the weekend) and my takeaway now is that only the first season was ever good.
For my dollar - I donāt think Iāll turn on the second season, but the obsession with flashbacks has really gotten so hacky. We know heās sad!!! We know heās self destructive. Talking about being self destructive and the characters actually doing something self destructive are just not the sam.
10 hours of waiting to see if some lady is going to e-sign a document
