Quaran-TV, part 2
May. 30th, 2020 01:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12This is a brief roundup of everything I've watched in May that I have not yet discussed. Matthias and I have continued to take advantage of the fact that we have no commutes, and thus our free time begins the instant our working day stops, at 5pm, to catch up on a backlog of streaming series, mainly on Netflix.
This seems to have been a month of watching rather silly fantasy/horror shows in non-English languages: we've watched an Austrian show (Freud, which I discussed earlier on this blog), a Colombian show, an Italian show, and a Dutch one.
We subscribed to Disney+ pretty much solely to watch The Mandalorian. I imagine that everyone who wanted to watch this has watched it already, so suffice it to say I found it an enjoyable, tropey space Western. I liked the shorter episode length — it sounds strange to say this series is great, and I'm so glad there was LESS content, but I think the half-hour length led to more tightly written episodes.
Earlier in the month, we finally got around to watching the second season of Altered Carbon. In this one, Anthony Mackie has replaced Joel Kinnaman in the lead role (the show takes place in the distant future, a time when human beings have technology in which a person's consciousness can be inserted into different bodies; the subsequent ethics of immortality is a major theme of the series), and there's been a major time skip. This series is kind of a weird one for me: I like the setting, the worldbuilding, and the characters, but I find what the narrative chooses to do with them a bit frustrating.
Miss Scarlet and the Duke is a Victorian crime series with a female private detective and a police officer grudgingly working together to solve crimes. It's pretty clichéd, every plot twist is telegraphed a mile away, and I found the inevitable romance between the pair really tedious (apart from anything else, they don't just bicker — he's downright nasty to her, and she has way more chemistry with the Jamaican petty criminal with whom she works on her cases), but it was diverting enough to watch with my brain switched off.
We then come to the trio of ridiculous Netflix fantasy/horror shows: Luna Nera (Italian witches being hunted by a shadowy organisation of bearskin-wearing witch-hunters), Siempre Bruja (Colombian teen drama about a time-travelling witch who escapes slavery and being burnt at the stake by the Inquisition to modern-day Cartagena, where she ends up studying biology at the university), and Ares (creepy Dutch horror show about a cult-like secret student society — if you've seen the episode of Buffy in season 2 about the fraternity, you can probably figure out where this show is going). All three shows are completely ridiculous — character motivations make no sense, characters seem to have complete personality transplants from one episode to the next, and a lot of the time they have that sort of fairytale logic where nothing gets explained. But if you're after a silly fantasy show, I'd recommend any one of them — I think all three are Netflix originals so you should be able to get them, no matter what region you live in.
The final episode of season 3 of Killing Eve will be out on Monday, so I might as well write about it in this post. I really want to say that I liked it, but I strongly feel that this is one of those shows which should only have been given one season. I enjoy the fact that it allows so many female characters to be monstrous, and to give so many actresses such interesting roles to play, but nothing about this season works for me. I'm also getting fed up with the increasing tendency of the Russian characters to speak to each other in Russian-accented English instead of in Russian.
Speaking of monstrous women, probably the best show for me this month has been Little Fires Everywhere. This is an adaptation of a novel by Celeste Ng, and it covers similar ground (in a similar tone) to Big Little Lies: class, race and gender in the United States, motherhood, and the dark, hypocritical heart of American suburbia. Both shows even star Reese Witherspoon — and in Little Fires Everywhere she stars alongside Kerry Washington, and the pair are fantastic. I really enjoy these prestige drama shows that focus on the stories of women, rather than the parade of gritty 'prestige TV' shows about nasty, selfish men that we've had for so many years.
At the start of the lockdown, Matthias and I had a habit of watching one film per week, but we've dropped this to a certain extent — mainly because it's hard to find a film we both want to watch that we can stream for free or rent very cheaply — but I did at least finally get around to watching one of his favourite films, LA Confidential, which I'd never seen before. I thought it was excellent, although I wonder what would have been different, had the film been made today.
And that's a (viewing) wrap on May!
This seems to have been a month of watching rather silly fantasy/horror shows in non-English languages: we've watched an Austrian show (Freud, which I discussed earlier on this blog), a Colombian show, an Italian show, and a Dutch one.
We subscribed to Disney+ pretty much solely to watch The Mandalorian. I imagine that everyone who wanted to watch this has watched it already, so suffice it to say I found it an enjoyable, tropey space Western. I liked the shorter episode length — it sounds strange to say this series is great, and I'm so glad there was LESS content, but I think the half-hour length led to more tightly written episodes.
Earlier in the month, we finally got around to watching the second season of Altered Carbon. In this one, Anthony Mackie has replaced Joel Kinnaman in the lead role (the show takes place in the distant future, a time when human beings have technology in which a person's consciousness can be inserted into different bodies; the subsequent ethics of immortality is a major theme of the series), and there's been a major time skip. This series is kind of a weird one for me: I like the setting, the worldbuilding, and the characters, but I find what the narrative chooses to do with them a bit frustrating.
Miss Scarlet and the Duke is a Victorian crime series with a female private detective and a police officer grudgingly working together to solve crimes. It's pretty clichéd, every plot twist is telegraphed a mile away, and I found the inevitable romance between the pair really tedious (apart from anything else, they don't just bicker — he's downright nasty to her, and she has way more chemistry with the Jamaican petty criminal with whom she works on her cases), but it was diverting enough to watch with my brain switched off.
We then come to the trio of ridiculous Netflix fantasy/horror shows: Luna Nera (Italian witches being hunted by a shadowy organisation of bearskin-wearing witch-hunters), Siempre Bruja (Colombian teen drama about a time-travelling witch who escapes slavery and being burnt at the stake by the Inquisition to modern-day Cartagena, where she ends up studying biology at the university), and Ares (creepy Dutch horror show about a cult-like secret student society — if you've seen the episode of Buffy in season 2 about the fraternity, you can probably figure out where this show is going). All three shows are completely ridiculous — character motivations make no sense, characters seem to have complete personality transplants from one episode to the next, and a lot of the time they have that sort of fairytale logic where nothing gets explained. But if you're after a silly fantasy show, I'd recommend any one of them — I think all three are Netflix originals so you should be able to get them, no matter what region you live in.
The final episode of season 3 of Killing Eve will be out on Monday, so I might as well write about it in this post. I really want to say that I liked it, but I strongly feel that this is one of those shows which should only have been given one season. I enjoy the fact that it allows so many female characters to be monstrous, and to give so many actresses such interesting roles to play, but nothing about this season works for me. I'm also getting fed up with the increasing tendency of the Russian characters to speak to each other in Russian-accented English instead of in Russian.
Speaking of monstrous women, probably the best show for me this month has been Little Fires Everywhere. This is an adaptation of a novel by Celeste Ng, and it covers similar ground (in a similar tone) to Big Little Lies: class, race and gender in the United States, motherhood, and the dark, hypocritical heart of American suburbia. Both shows even star Reese Witherspoon — and in Little Fires Everywhere she stars alongside Kerry Washington, and the pair are fantastic. I really enjoy these prestige drama shows that focus on the stories of women, rather than the parade of gritty 'prestige TV' shows about nasty, selfish men that we've had for so many years.
At the start of the lockdown, Matthias and I had a habit of watching one film per week, but we've dropped this to a certain extent — mainly because it's hard to find a film we both want to watch that we can stream for free or rent very cheaply — but I did at least finally get around to watching one of his favourite films, LA Confidential, which I'd never seen before. I thought it was excellent, although I wonder what would have been different, had the film been made today.
And that's a (viewing) wrap on May!