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william_kent
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My Saturday night curry club companion announced that she wanted to watch "The Rig", so I went through the hassle of logging into my Amazon Prime account on her TV, and from the first few seconds I knew it was going to be bad. I suspect that they couldn't get Danny Dyer so they just hired someone who had gone to the same drama school. He falls on his head from a great height and starts talking about a 'big wave" yet somehow other workers on the rig take him seriously. We watched the first two episodes and then were all rigged out, but my friend must have watched the next two a couple of days later because when I next visited she filled me in on the obvious plot developments. Then we watched the penultimate episode and attempted the finale, but twenty minutes in she snapped and said "I can't take anymore of this shit" and turned it off. All the way through she was saying "this is like a school kid wrote it" and I wasn't about to argue. Terrible.
edit: this reminds me that I still haven't watched the last episode of "rings of power", that Tolkien rip-off that is also on amazon prime, but I just can't be arsed to be honest, I realise I have no interest in what happens, no empathy for the characterisations whatsoever
edit: this reminds me that I still haven't watched the last episode of "rings of power", that Tolkien rip-off that is also on amazon prime, but I just can't be arsed to be honest, I realise I have no interest in what happens, no empathy for the characterisations whatsoever
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IdleRich
IdleRich
It's a bold step to fuck something off when you've invested a certain amount of time but sometimes it's the right thing to do and I admire those who can do it. The other day I was slagging a film off on here and it suddenly hit me that if I hated it so much there was no point in continuing, can hardly say I regretted it.
william_kent
Well-known member
I learnt a lesson when I was about 11 or 12 that sometimes you just have to throw the book you're struggling to finish in the bin, and it is no fault of your own, it's the creator who fucked up if they can't hold your attention... same goes for any media to be honest
william_kent
Well-known member
nah, it's not your fault
if the work can't engage and transcend your mood then... maybe it's just not that good?
I had a real struggle recently with that Le Carre book, The Little Drummer Girl, a real slog but I finally got to the end, and well, it was a bit shit really wasn't it?
IdleRich
IdleRich
Strangely enough I lost interest about halfway through, it's sitting reproachfully on the side. I liked the stuff about Israeli intelligence, I just really struggle to accept they would recruit a random English actor to their cause. My own fault really cos in the precis it says that's what it is about, but when you're confronted with it after the realism of what went before it strains credulity.
IdleRich
IdleRich
Well I watched all of The Peripheral and, on the whole, I really enjoyed it. I think the pragmatic way that they dealt with time travel and its consequences was one of the most satisfying I've seen.
What happens in the series is that when someone goes back in time they change the past and so a fork occurs with a new, changed timeline diverging from the one in which the person went back. Which I guess is one of the standard approaches.
But what I found believable here is that the people in the first timeline believe theirs is the sort of naturally superior one, and the others which diverge from it they denote as 'stubs' which they feel free to fuck with as they like by testing new technology, untried drugs and so on - basically anything that might bring them money. At one point they spell it out quite literally, it's a kind of colonisation of parallel dimensions rather than space with stub-inhabitants being denied any rights whatsoever cos they're not us.
There were a few plotholes, or maybe it's better to say that a lot of the time the limits of the technology of the future are left vague and so you're never sure if the characters are in danger or if they are gonna be able to teleport (or something) the problem away. And when they were/weren't able to do this felt inconsistently applied and arbitrary.
My main gripe though was the fighting scenes. Every now and again there would be these totally extraneous bits where there would suddenly be a long and pointless overly choreographed fight. Most didn't seem part of the plot, it was though they had been told that they must put one such scene in every episode. It especially grated with Flynn's 'peripheral' having the unexplained and unearned ability do all this Bruce Lee stuff out of nowhere - I just found it really uninvolving to see the hero magically gaining these powers and then fighting loads of background characters for the most tenuous of reasons at great length. I dunno if I'm explaining it properly but the fight scenes felt so wrong that I got kinda embarrassed and uncomfortable watching them and they ultimately dragged the show down a notch in my estimation.
A shame cos there was loads of good stuff with interesting plotting and ideas. Ending was a bit rushed though and seemed entirely designed to set up series 2. As usual.
entertainment
Well-known member
The Last of Us started well I thought but turned out pretty dull and lifeless.
you
Well-known member
Eli Zaretsky | ‘The White Lotus’ · LRB 28 December 2022
By foregrounding the sexual relations and fantasies among and between the staff and the guests, The White Lotus analyses...
www.lrb.co.uk
"A lot of my intuition is based on her physicality."
If you enjoyed White Lotus you'll love this blog.
IdleRich
IdleRich
In Portugal there is this (American) true crime channel that has hundreds of horrible shows that gleefully go into forensic detail over the most horrible crimes. They all have titles like The Dallas Demon or The Vampire Beside Me and they are relentlessly, intensely grim. And fascinating, sadly. For a long time I tried to pretend I'm not interested in this stuff. I don't want to be one of those people who knows about serial killers... but I guess I do have a slight tendency in that direction that I can't deny.
Liza is much worse than me, there was this one we watched about that poisoner guy and it talked about how he bonded with Ian Brady in jail - and she said "of course, they were both massively into Nazi stuff" - and... that was a little concerning when she turned out to be totally right.
Liza is much worse than me, there was this one we watched about that poisoner guy and it talked about how he bonded with Ian Brady in jail - and she said "of course, they were both massively into Nazi stuff" - and... that was a little concerning when she turned out to be totally right.
