Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Very true.

Now my brain is stuck trying to identify films that change partway through...Society, From Dusk til Dawn, Psycho, The Birds, Audition, Martyrs, Coherence sort of, The Rapture (which is fucking brilliant, could have done with changing the title tho in the service of suspense)....

Full Metal Jacket? Fight Club?

Half-Life, if you're into games.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Yeah, full Metal Jacket is a good one. Fight Club was so bad I can barely recall it.

Don't know anything about games - what happens in that one?

Neither change genre, but Aliens and Jaws are masterly examples of splitting a film into two parts to make it seem more epic
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
Why was that sense of dread in the X-Files so popular in the 90s - because it was absent from culture in general and people always need it?
tldr - yeah I think so

the X-Files was done 3 years before it technically ended - when Duchovny left - so the 9/11 allusion you have isn't exactly right but it did fit perfectly into that space between the end of the Cold War and 9/11. the brief true Pax Americana, what historians will very likely look back at as the peak of American power, no serious visible external enemy to Other. plus a booming economy. salad days. so hostility turns inward, amplifying/combining with traditional Paranoid Style In American Politics conspiratorial suspicion. and then yes a very harsh wakeup call burst that fever dream bubble.

those comedic recurring minor characters T mentioned - the Lone Gunman - a big part of the joke is that they're usually right despite even Mulder not believing them. and ya nowadays I mean those dudes were middle-aged 2600 hackers types but it's hard not to see a germ of Infowars, 4chan/reddit conspiracy black holes, Qanon. Fake news. We basically live in a Phillip K. Dick short story collection at this point. Tbf no show could've predicted the rise of social media and its largely toxic effect on social discourse, information distribution, etc.

there's also the fact that having been exposed to actual conspiracies or their evidence it turns out they're way more mundane/boring, tawdry, but also often abstractly vicious than the X-Files, with its cabal of old guys making deals with black ooze aliens or whatever.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
actually there's a flashback episode that is the Lone Gunmen's origin story and it's pretty good

not top 10 material or anything but enjoyable, plus nice metacommentary on the show's own paranoia worldview origins
 

john eden

male pale and stale
Apparently there's going to be a new series of Phone Shop, but set in outer space? Like a revamped Red Dwarf thing. Javone Prince is in, but sadly not Emma Fryer.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
Psyched to hear that Vice have picked up the option for Season 2 of Kocktails with Khloé.

They have a segment in each episode about natural highs apparently? Very 2005.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
When I look back on my long life on this cursed planet, my main regret is that I have been unable to see the 1989 pilot for the never to be made Australian version of Rentaghost.

Rentaghost remains, for the cognoscenti, the dialectical resolution of the original Ghostbusters and The Matrix franchise.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
The Defiant Ones - started off really well, better than Straight Outta Compton with the early Dre footage and Alonso Williams' hilarious pieces to camera. Ended depressingly - why would anyone with such musical talent become obsessed with business and fucking headphones?! Both Dre and Iovine endlessly stuck in the trap of trying to prove something - what? - to the parts of society that rejected/patronised them as young men. A story as old as human society.
 

Leo

Well-known member
halfway through season two of "occupied" from norway, just as good as the first (which was pretty great). the original season predated all the news about Russian meddling, ahead of the curve.
 

sufi

lala
I enjoyed Killing Amy, a bit, not as good or as rough as fleabag though,
and now i'm enjoying Mystery Road ... oz noir
 

catalog

Well-known member
Is anyone watching Season 2 of "The Sinner"? It's reminiscent of the first season of True Detective... sort of classic noir/thriller stuff but kinda good to see Bill Pullman again.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
I enjoyed Killing Amy, a bit, not as good or as rough as fleabag though,
and now i'm enjoying Mystery Road ... oz noir

While Killing Amy had lots of good points, I found some of the sadism under the guise of 'edgy' entertainment pretty disturbing. Having watched a few episodes of Crashing as well, imo there's generally something disturbed/ing in Phoebe Waller-Bridge's writing, underneath the (very) seductive patina of the engaging and wry scripts. This seems quite an obvious thing to say, but most of the reviews of her shows seem to totally miss it/ignore it.
 
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mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
Hadn't heard about The Final Table, but will investigate...

My favourite piece of TV cookery competition ever:


OMG that's fantastic, thank you. Final Table is grandiosity and pomposity and deep voiced announcers and sets that make the cooks look like Hindu gods.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Anyone been bothering with S3 of True Detective? It isn't as good as the first, but it's a lot better than the second. Stephen Dorff making everyone wonder where he's been since Blade.

Not yet, but tempted. I got two episodes into the second series and gave up. That bloody girl singing in the bar was so Lynch-by-numbers is was actually cringe-making...
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
I'm not sure this is the right crowd to cure my confusion, but can someone explain to me the enduring popularity of mildly 'edgy' comedy dramas such as Sex Education? It seems to be written by people who have only just discovered that Heathers exists.

I don't watch TV that much these days, but it doesn't seem that much has changed in the UK over the past 20 years, when I see a show like this. It's mildly diverting, and the main draw of Gillian Anderson as a sex therapist has its appeal, but there's just nothing at all at stake (and in that way it shares something with True Detective Series 2).

See also Catastrophe, which at least had the saving grace of being pretty funny at times.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
My guess would be it has 'sex' in the title. Also, isn't it a Netflix show? I didn't know it was British.

I recently watched the Beeb's ridiculous 'Les Miserables' (well, since I haven't read the book it might be Hugo's ridiculous Les Mis), which was worth watching only for Dominic West's doglike eyes. Javert was the most ludicrously monomaniacal character, served up by David Oyelowo as hammy as a ham sandwich. I couldn't tell if the incredible coincidences in it were simply Victorian era devices or if Andrew Davies had made the whole thing much less believable by compressing 1000 pages into six hours.

The best 'TV' I've seen recently has been series starring Benedict Cumberbatch - Patrick Melrose and The Hollow Crown: Richard III. He often does a variation on the same character - autistically disconnected genius man/bastard - but he's definitely a 'i'll watch him in anything' case.
 

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
I'm not sure this is the right crowd to cure my confusion, but can someone explain to me the enduring popularity of mildly 'edgy' comedy dramas such as Sex Education? It seems to be written by people who have only just discovered that Heathers exists.

I don't watch TV that much these days, but it doesn't seem that much has changed in the UK over the past 20 years, when I see a show like this. It's mildly diverting, and the main draw of Gillian Anderson as a sex therapist has its appeal, but there's just nothing at all at stake (and in that way it shares something with True Detective Series 2).

See also Catastrophe, which at least had the saving grace of being pretty funny at times.

i feel that it doesn't really matter what netflix brings out, it will be the talk of the day for some weeks before it fades away slowly. with everything being available on demand now, one would assume that a lot of different people would watch different stuff but it seems it works out the other way around: everybody is consuming the same.
 
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