You probably don't want to watch Dark then.
We had narration in 1983, but not in a way young people can understand.
We watched the whole thing a few weeks ago, after zillions of people said we HAD TO watch it. However, we both loved it, possibly because we are in the target demographic.
The one thing that was a bit annoying was the occasionally labored 80's references and fan service. (I'm sure "Ready Player One" will be even worse.)
ST had some great acting ("11," especially), and it was hilarious to discover after the fact that many of the actors, including her, are Brits.
We are now starting to watch Black Mirror, and having skipped the notorious S1E1, we are liking it.
We're definitely the target graphic- they showed page from the Fiend Folio and I said hey, that's a Mind Flayer, and 11 needs to use Astral Projection to contact Will- but I think we've been forever put off of mystery/horror shows where every episode ends in a cliffhanger because idiot character forgot to tell someone else that they were going off on their own to fight evil tentacle pit or whatever.
Demographic. Like demogorgon and graphic put together, get it?
I haven't heard of either of these, but recommend The Good Place heartily.
I refuse to believe someone under 50 who spends more than an hour a week online has never heard of Stranger Things.
The Good Place and GLOW both seconded.
I haven't seen ST yet. I did see GLOW which I thought was great and very funny and I loved it, at a minimum it is a local period piece extremely well targeted to appeal to me personally but it is also better than that. I predict Heebie will love it.
Even so, I can't help a lingering feeling that Donald Trump has killed any enjoyment of professional wrestling in general (maybe female pro wrestling in particular) because it is tied too closely to the current moronocracy and dumb but fun doesn't really exist in the same way. Just another thing that the asshole has ruined, I hate Trump so much. Relatedly, a miasma of disgust at old English men because of Brexit makes the don't-call-it-Top-Gear reboot Grand Tour fundamentally depressing and not fun. Fuckers have ruined everything.
at a minimum it is a local period piece extremely well targeted to appeal to me personally but it is also better than that
Yeah, other than the presence of Alison Brie it's really not targeted to appeal to me at all, and yet I ended up loving it.
We're a bit further into ST than you--we just watched the first two episodes in the past week. I also have a low tolerance for unnecessary anxiety and thus horror in general (the only horror movie in years I've seen in a theater is Get Out), but I think I can get through it if I stick to one episode a night. I hadn't considered the tension between the setting and modern standards of pacing before.
I'm sure "Ready Player One" will be even worse.
Yes. It will be much, much worse. The source material is irredeemable.
Stranger Things, GLOW, and Godless are all shows I really wanted to like but are dumb and boring. I'm not trolling and I'm sure you all have excellent reasons for liking them. I find all of them tedious, though each in their own special way.
I mean at a deeper level Kraab is probably right.
Stranger Things I think is massively overrated, but I still find it pretty engrossing (1st season anyway) as a guilty pleasure. It has some great elements, I just don't think it's better than the sum of its parts.
Godless I also wanted to like and just found dumb and boring, albeit occasionally very beautiful, because I'm a sucker for Western landscapes.
GLOW I went in skeptical and came out a fan.
We're usually watching one longer show (just rewatched Scott and Bailey and are at loose ends for a replacement) and a couple of short comedies (e.g., Schitt's Creek, Master of None). Currently those are Outnumbered and The Thick of It, both heartily recommended. For the latter, you (for American values of you) have to accept that you won't understand half the dialogue and you (for all values of you) need to find Peter Capaldi's relentless, brutal, and spectacularly filthy tirades entertaining.
I loved the first season of Stranger Things, but the pleasure is all in giggling over nostalgic references -- it was ultimately pretty dumb, and when the second season came out I had no desire to watch it.
GLOW was really entertaining at first but I got bored and gave it up after a couple of episodes.
I just finished Twin Peaks The Return last night. 100% pure love.
it was hilarious to discover after the fact that many of the actors, including her, are Brits.
It's astounding how many British actors can completely pass as Americans: Damian Lewis, Hugh Laurie, David Tennant (even if you already know he's Scottish). The British actors who played the naive young singer/songwriter couple in Nashville have amazing Tennessee accents. The common wisdom is that 1) British actors are more likely to be classically trained; 2) many Brits are already fluent in several accents for code-switching in a reifed class structure, see My Fair Lady; and 3) Meryl Streep dusted the entire commonwealth with her magic powder.
M commented while watching Stranger Things that while of course they can't have kids calling each other "gaylord" on tv, it really doesn't feel like the early 80s when they don't.
I just finished Twin Peaks The Return last night. 100% pure love.
Hell yes.
I watch TV shows when the library gets them on DVD, so I'm about a year behind but:
I just watched the first season of The Good Place and really enjoyed it. I thought season one of Superstore was decent light-weight fun, and am hoping that season two is slightly sharper. But the show that I've been most enjoying for the last couple of years is, surprisingly, Mom*. I didn't expect to like it but Allison Janey and Mimi Kennedy are so wonderfully good that they carry the show through the inevitable weak parts. (And, as a side note, by season 3 it sidelined all of the major male characters and there is something notable about a show in which it isn't surprising for there to be an episode in which no male characters appear at all).
* Terrible person warning: produced by Chuck Lorre.
** Not for any
[ignore second footnote, that's a reference to something I removed]
17: My pet theory is that, as they are growing up, British actors get more exposure to U.S. accents via movies/TV, as compared to Americans' exposure to British accents.
My pet theory is that the accent of English speakers in the American Midwest is the default for all humans.
M commented while watching Stranger Things that while of course they can't have kids calling each other "gaylord" on tv, it really doesn't feel like the early 80s when they don't.
You should probably watch Dark then.
Once you start looking for it, you start recognizing how male British actors doing an "all-purpose American accent" do this thing where they make their voice gruff so the vowels are easier to get right. Dr. House may have pioneered this.
The Jordan, Jesse, Go! podcast has a running joke about that, based on Liam Neeson.
8 - I literally just recommended both The Good Place and GLOW to someone in my office 15 minutes ago.
I've been on a mission to get everyone I know to watch both of these shows.
But it's such a massive improvement since the 80s and earlier when the "all-purpose American accent" on British TV shows was either Rootin-Tootin Texas Oilman or World War II Brooklyn Guy.
To be fair, almost everything on British TV shows has improved since the 80s and earlier.
29: I don't know, I still think that Tom Baker was the best Doctor.
Are You Being Served wasn't the peak?
I feel like so many people have talked about Stranger Things I should watch it but Netflix has become like HBO to me: most things when I finally watch them turn out to be things I don't like enough to pay for. I haven't subscribed to Netflix for something like a year.
On the other hand, mostly I watch TCM if I watch tv so I'm pretty much an extreme outlier.
I don't know how much HBO costs, but Netflix is like $10.
That's at least $120 I haven't spent on a service where my most frequent experience before unsubscribing was spending 20 minutes scrolling through list and then doing something else.
We started watching once we got our GIANT NEW TV for Xmas. I don't do tension that well, but liked it well enough. Iris loves it (has already seen both seasons), Kai, (who's just 9) is coping, but keeps delaying the watching of Ep. 4.
AB (who's exactly between the ages of the little brother and big sister) was a bit underwhelmed by the design; I may be expressing her opinion wrong, but I think her objection was that it felt like somebody evoking the era with symbols rather than actually capturing it. I appreciated that the music (so far) isn't just, or even mostly, 1983 stuff, which its a mistake movies make all too frequently, as if anyone anywhere listens only to stuff released in the last 6-12 months.
Poor Barb.
I'm kind of the opposite. I would be fairly happy to only watch Netflix. Admittedly some of the stuff on it that I really like isn't truly Netflix exclusive (eg The Good Place) on an international basis, but that doesn't make any difference to me as a viewer in the UK. It's where I watched Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, it's where I watched The Expanse, and it's where I watched Orphan Black. On top of that's it's where I watched Dark and Master Of None and Kimmy Schmidt and Lady Dynamite, and it's where I watch a shit-ton of stand-up (but we've had that conversation before).
34: I'm annoyed to have ended up with both Hulu and Netflix, and we probably watch a bit more of the former than the latter, but I wouldn't give up either (we have no cable. I believe Iris watches much more Netflix; maybe I can make her kick in.
Oh, right, the music- the whole show it was so obvious that they were planning to sell a soundtrack album.
The best part of Stranger Things is the nostalgia value that Sean Astin and Paul Reiser bring to season two.
The music is great. I'm so glad they used that kind of music instead of a period soundtrack of Depeche Mode and the Go-Gos or whatever. People are doing great things with synthwave music.
34: I thought HBO was much more expensive (because the last time I priced it we had cable), but I see that is it not.
spending 20 minutes scrolling through list
20 minutes of fun!
Paul Reiser is also in the sweet-tempered retro Red Oaks, which I liked quite a lot.
The most disconcerting thing was one day around Christmas, when legacy movie marathons are often on TV, we finished watching an episode of ST and put regular TV back on and there was an ad for Beetlejuice with teen Winona.
I feel like Paul Riser should have stuck to trying to trap people with aliens and having Helen Hunt spit on his head.
44 makes me want to watch Heathers again. The one movie that really gets Ohio.
16.last. We watched Twin Peaks The Return all the way to the end: "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on you." After a while we even started saying, "he won't resolve/explain/make sense of anything, will he?"
Aside from the nostalgia value and our general liking for David Lynch's stuff and his ensemble, it was mostly just annoying.
Since the original Twin Peaks has been on Netflix, I started rewatching it recently. The sweaters that the Sheriff wears really jumped out at me for some reason. They seem more dated than the rest of the fashion in the series.
Not a Brit but I'd also credit Saoirse Ronan in Ladybird as believably American. On the other hand, Benedict Cumberbatch in Doctor Strange is so bad I have to think it's intentional.
26: I'm Joe! From Brooklyn! I'm an American!
sweet-tempered retro Red Oaks, which I liked quite a lot
We dip into this occasionally (in the middle of season 1) and that's a good description, and I share the assessment. I think it might have been recommended here, actually.
"he won't resolve/explain/make sense of anything, will he?"
spoiler alert
There's no real point in arguing about this because it's largely a matter of taste, but you can't really go into Twin Peaks expecting perfect resolution or explanation. As for making sense, I thought Lynch and Frost did that, just enough. There's a dream logic through the whole series, and the last two episodes wrapped everything up in a way that provided some satisfaction to the viewer who has waited 25 years to find out what happened, without being too real-world logical. In the second half of the series, and especially episode 17, you get to say goodbye to Hawk/Log Lady, Big Ed/Norma, Nadine, Bobby, and Andy/Lucy. And then in episode 18 Twin Peaks opens back up again into dream logic, and we are left with the nightmare of Laura's death that Cooper can never put right.
I endorse 51. Dave LMA appears to be the anti-me (including the fact that he apparently plans to watch Ready Player One, though excluding his claimed pre-existing fondness for the works of David Lynch).
51. A matter of taste, indeed. We liked a lot of it and loved parts of it, but there was too much gratuitous weirdness for the sake of weirdness, like an over-funded music video.
52. The "anti-me!" I thought that was DaveLHI.
I doubt I'll watch RP1 until it's on Netflix or wherever, but it hits a lot of my 80's buttons. The book was indeed stupid, but then, so were the 80's.
ST was perfect for the kind of watching-while-doing-something-else but I could never have made it through a season actually paying attention. I have no particular criticism, I think I just have no love for all the 80s culture it's calling back to. Although I'm probably the absolute target demographic, I was busy in the 80's surviving a very distressing adolescence and the whole nostalgia we're supposed to feel for that time in our lives, I have not one single drop of. Fuck the 80's forever.
Godless on the other hand became an involuntary binge-watch in the sense that I couldn't stop watching even when I really needed to go to bed. Best thing I've watched in recent memory. I can get that it wouldn't be everybody's cup of tea, or too violent, or you don't like westerns, or whatever, but... dumb and boring? We just can't have watched the same show.
Ready Player One, the book, wasn't just stupid--which I'll forgive--but relentless offensive. It found the worst things of white guy nerd culture and lionized them. If I didn't know more about the author I would think it's parody. He made a culture where the world is awful and the only thing worthwhile just so happens to be the thing he loves--if that's the only way he can explain its goodness, what could possibly be more damning of his tastes? The female and non-white characters are just cardboard objects there to promote the one true person, the protagonist. That it sold well and has a movie adaptation is demoralizing.
I think it'd be healthier to put on some Rush or whatever and play an NES Classic or watch Back to the Future directly. Bonus points if done in a wood-paneled basement. Extra bonus points if done while considering how to approach childish things as an adult.
What it was really kind of a parody of was William Gibson's "Neuromancer" (also a product of the 80's) and its sequels.
No, really, it's not a parody. It might be a homage, and steal some of the plot points of other works, but its surface-level nerdery is entirely in good faith.
Can we talk about incredibly shitty the Hulu user interface is? It's a godawful color, the navigation is not only not intuitive but actively non-intuitive, the alert that there are new episodes of something look like just more text, it often advances to the wrong episode, most of the shows are buried in a page three screens away from the main page, and a bunch of other annoying stuff.
It's very strange that I enjoyed Ready Player One, even though I'm not much of a fan of any of the stuff he loves. I guess it was all so transparent - - I'm going to create an alternate universe in which my skill at obsolete video games and knowledge of 80s trivia, will make me a hero! How can you be offended by something so silly and fun? Maybe because some people take it seriously?
I liked Godless as well. The scenery carried it more than the dialogue, but that's not a detriment. Kind of like Open Range in that regard. (No, I'm not calling Annette Benning scenery.)
I could have cut 15 minutes at least from the last episode, though.
58. Oh yes. It took me a week to figure out that I could use the menu button on my remote to get to an episode that I chose rather than Hulu.
Rush belongs to all, not just the white man: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJ2wXoqAhI4&list=LLobpbdl3uFT0gQfhKEUxjoA
I'd never heard of Ready Player One until people started asking me if I was going to see the movie.
59: And conversely I think I dislike it so strongly because I like the source material. The premise as you stated is fine, and could be an interesting starting point for a well-written story--but RP1 isn't cognizant of the culture it was written within. We don't need another story about how a diverse group of ethnic stereotypes and two-dimensional women tell a white boy that he really is truly special and better than everyone else. Especially not these days--although explicit internet white supremacy was less of a thing when he wrote it.
And it's not really a particularly silly or fun story. At no point did it feel full of childlike glee, but it is instead a constant recitation of nerd cred. If I wanted to hear somebody say that if you don't know where all the warp whistles in Super Mario Bros. 3 are you aren't a real gamer, I'd go on Reddit. The main character's an ass.
I'm largely in agreement with this take.
62 is right, of course.
62 - holy shit that is awesome. I believe that children are the future, and I hope that one in particular is.
Other Brits doing American accents:
John Boyega in Star Wars
Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out (and Sicario)
Kelly Macdonald* in No Country for Old Men.
idris Elba, obviously.
I think the interesting thing is that all of the actors doing 'generic gruff American' male vowels are posh: Damien Lewis, Hugh Laurie, Dominic West, etc.
I think (but I may be just pulling this out of my arse) that working class, Northern, and Scottish actors tend to do it better.
* be still my beating heart ...
David Harewood - on both Homeland and Supergirl.
Who is, on research, from Birmingham!
If this is the pop culture thread, do you think it is just coincidental that "Busta Rhymes" rhymes with "Chester Himes?"
If this is the pop culture thread, do you think it is just coincidental that "Busta Rhymes" rhymes with "Chester Himes?"
And speaking of GLOW, my friend wrote for it! Nice to see someone with talent and good politics get a break. I can't really think about TV right now though.
I love the Good Place so much, I enjoyed ST as well-executed nostalgia, and am secretly fond of wood panelling.
re: 65
Lisa X:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4W4vzDRcY8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J19s4MiCM4Y
There's a whole set of kid and teenage guitar shredders out there playing ridiculous stuff.
My brother (paraphrased): I can see how you liked The Good Place after that season-finale twist.
Me: No, I liked it before that too. Something about the relentless lightness and fantasia.
Just finished House of Lies. Far from perfect, only two good seasons, but I think lots of interesting goodness.
Bless you, dalriata. You are so very, very right about Ready Player One's creepy gross awfulness.
I have not seen Stranger Things but the best show for '80 music absolutely has to be Comrade Detective. I'm watching but not exactly enjoying the third season of Hinterland after enjoying (maybe not the right word) the third season of Broadchurch. I'm not very good at watching things these days, I suppose, but I'm trying to build in more knitting time.
Halt and Catch Fire, which like three people watched, but which I really liked, also had good 80s music. Until the story got into the 90s.
What annoyed me most about RP1 was that none of the supposedly obscure 80s game references was actually all that obscure. If you grew up in the 80s and played any games at all you have a good chance of knowing a few of the answers. The book is transparently set up to allow any 80s kid reading it to congratulate themselves on knowing stuff that really isn't that hard to pick up. Rather like Dan Brown.
We watched Godless and enjoyed much of it. The photography was truly wonderful. What else can I watch with similarly glorious landscapes in a starring role?
[It wasn't just the landscapes. The horses were pretty good too, and some of the human actors. But there was a wee bit too much Portentious Symbolism for my taste.
Ume has never seen the Wire which I would be prepared to rewatch; Halt and Catch Fire sounds fun. I used to fish occasionally with a cousin of the Eubanks who wrote CP/M
We watched Godless and enjoyed much of it. The photography was truly wonderful. What else can I watch with similarly glorious landscapes in a starring role?
TV-wise, not a lot. Fargo? Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul? I hear Top Of The Lake looks very nice, but I haven't seen it.
78. Of course the "puzzles" were easy. The whole idea is that the reader knows all or most of the answers going in, and so feels that they could get the Golden Ticket (or whatever it was called there) themselves.
I remember The Killing had good Pacific northwest photography, but the first two seasons really felt like they were dragging things out. It was shot in Vancouver, but since it was set in the Seattle area they did a lot less disguising of the shooting location than most Vancouver based productions.
To combine threads, in terms of easy puzzles nothing can beat the one at the center (ha) of Banks's not-quite-Culture The Algebraist. As in, easy enough to make you wonder if this is one of those sci-fi universes where everyone is secretly illiterate, like Star Wars.
The Killing was so frustrating. Good idea, top notch acting, and looked beautiful, but otherwise completely infuriating (boring pacing, dumb plot, badly written dialogue, single most infuriating episode of television I've ever seen).
The Killing was so frustrating.
Been there.
84, 86: I think that's a sort of fundamental problem with books incorporating puzzles. That is, the feeling of solving something is part of what the writer is going for, but making you actually solve a difficult puzzle is going to interrupt the book too much. So it can be stupidly easy, or the writer can walk you through the solution (as in Have His Carcase) but that takes up a lot of narrative time. It feels like pandering, but I think it's hard to get around.
Instead of watching The Killing just read the epic rant about its worst episode (spoilers, of course).
I generally liked Have His Carcase, but really skimmed the puzzle part.
89: Yeah, this is why puzzles make more sense in video games than in books. I really want someone to make a procedural episodic murder mystery video game which releases monthly new murders.
I didn't read the songs/poems in Lord of the Rings either.
Those books are the same because they both had people getting stabbed, aristocrats, and charges on horseback.
92: The Ace Attorney games might scratch that itch.
And to dissect that a bit more--is it just that they make more sense because video games have accepted that challenges (puzzles, bosses, difficult jumps, whatever) that completely derail narratives are an acceptable convention? I have definitely put down games because I was into them for the narrative but got hung up on the amount of grinding.
93: Was it here that someone suggested that liking LotR is basically a test of whether you are (or as a child were) a reader who skims? The theory being that reading all the poems is boring as all get out.
That's one element of Nero Wolfe books I like. Half the time his considered opinion is that there is insufficient information to deduce who's guilty, and to instruct Archie to go shake the trees in some way.
Archie is a little too something or other.
99: Evans likes to plug it on social media, and it's a product created by Mukhande Singh (born Christopher Sanborn)
Also: Mr. Singh believes that public water has been poisoned. "Tap water? You're drinking toilet water with birth control drugs in them," he said. "Chloramine, and on top of that they're putting in fluoride. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but it's a mind-control drug that has no benefit to our dental health."
God, I wish I had half the confidence of these men.
I wish I could figure out a way to go long in giardiasis.
Anyway, I drink out of springs on occasion, but I use a filter. Just because you see it come out of the ground doesn't mean that 100 yards away it isn't on the surface at the place where all the raccoons with diarrhea hang out.
Typical treatment includes:
Metronidazole (Sanofi)
Tinidazole (Pfizer)
Nitazoxanide (various generics)
Unfortunately the upside of more sales of drugs for gastric infection is probably offset by the ongoing rejection of modern medicine by people like those in the article.
I actually liked most of the third season of The Killing, which was an almost completely independent plot line.