Quaran-TV, part 14
Oct. 31st, 2021 01:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12I suppose at this point I really need to rename this series of posts, since we're not in any kind of quarantine to speak on (apart from self-imposed limits). Sigh.
This month I seem to have watched my way through a lot of TV and films. I suspect this is due to a combination of cold/rainy/dark October weather keeping us indoors, and our closest local friends in Ely moving away, which has basically rendered our in-person social lives nonexistent.
This month, I've finished six TV series (while also being midway through many more).
The North Water is a grim historical miniseries set on a whaling ship in the nineteenth century. I'm not the only person who has compared it to The Terror — it's another story about violent, selfish nineteenth-century British men travelling to the harsh landscape of the Arctic, and suffering the consequences of their acquisitive rapaciousness. I'm not someone who needs all their fiction to be about fundamentally good people trying to do the right thing, but if all the characters in a work of fiction are irredeemable monsters, I need the work to be saying something more interesting than all men are beasts, and if you take them to a sufficiently harsh environment this beastly nature will reveal itself. Victor Kelleher has done this theme better, many many times, and he was writing dystopian novels for Australian teenagers in the 1980s and 1990s.
Lucifer probably needs no introduction at the point of its final season, and I wish I could say it finished on a high note. I was glad the show found a second home on Netflix, but this is possibly one of the few TV series that I prefer to hew to a more episodic rather than serialised format. I like it when it's case/monster-of-the week, and I'm less interested in the overarching mythology. And this final season involved time travel shenanigans, which for me are always a risky proposition. Creators need to be careful with time travel plots — because they can easily fall into a trap of rendering all character growth, and all character choices utterly meaningless. And when it comes to a show whose foundational principle is the importance of free will, that's a problem.
Brand New Cherry Flavour is a Netflix miniseries that is much more to my taste. It's an adaptation of a novel (which I hadn't read) set in 1990s Hollywood, a surreal revenge fantasy in which a young woman director pitching her first short film is betrayed by her potential producer and turns to the occult to get back at him. At this point, things degenerate into a claustrophic nightmare filled with body horror. The show does a great job at evoking both the look and feel of Hollywood in that era, and the look and feel of the visual media of that period. It even has a suitably 1990s thematic thread of young women seeking power in the occult and being ruined by it. I loved it, but heed my warning if you have a problem with visual gore.
Hollington Drive is a British crime drama, the next in a long line of such stories set in idyllic suburban locations whose charm (genteel wealth, everyone knows everyone) turns sinister and claustrophic when a murder rips the close-knit community apart. It doesn't do anything particularly groundbreaking With these concepts, but a strong central performance by Anna Maxwell Martin and a focus on the relationship between two adult sisters makes it worth watching.
Ridley Road is a BBC historical drama set in 1960s London, based on real events in which members of a Jewish antifascist organisation went undercover in the resurgent British fascist movement and gathered enough evidence of crimes being committed to put the movement's leader in prison. I assume the show takes some significant liberties with the experiences and identities of the real figures involved in all this, but it does a great job of evoking the look, feel, and political and cultural climate of the era, and it's obviously great (if terrifying) to watch the group of Jewish operatives outwit and take down a pack of violent fascists.
The Long Call is an adaptation of another Ann Cleeves (of Shetland fame) detective novel, and it has all the hallmarks of her work — haunted but fundamentally good people feel sad in picturesque British locations (in this case in Devon) while solving crimes. The detective in this case is a gay man in a stable and loving relationship, and, refreshingly, while he's haunted by his past (he's a survivor of a fundamentalist cult), unlike other tormented TV detectives he doesn't deal with his personal pain with alcohol, drugs, self-destructive behaviour or by destroying his relationships with everyone who cares about him. Instead, he hugs his husband or swims laps across the idyllic sea. It's a refreshing change!
I mentioned last week that we saw Dune, so I won't go over that again (except to say that my love for it has not abated). I've watched two other films this month:
The Truffle Hunters is a sweet-natured little documentary about the unbelievable market for truffles, and the eccentric community of ageing Italian men who — with their specially trained dogs — sniff out this expensive commodity and sell it to dealers (who then sell it on at eyewatering markups). There are intense rivalries (none of the eponymous truffle hunters reveal the exact location of their patches of forest to anyone else, the training of the dogs is a closely-guarded secret), there are surprising dangers (for reasons of secrecy, most of the hunters gather their truffles in the night, which for a bunch of men in their seventies and eighties is obviously less than ideal), and, most amusingly, the sales of truffles resemble shady back-alley drug deals. I loved every minute of this film!
Venom was a film I'd been avoiding due to my own personal irritation with migratory Tom Hardy fandom and its tendency to overhype every project he's ever involved with. (There's nothing really wrong with this fandom — all they are is loudly enthusiastic — they've just been annoying me ever since Inception was a thing, and they've made me unjustifiably wary of any media in which Hardy is involved.) In any case, Venom is exactly as silly as I expected (down-on-his luck journalist ends up infected with a sentient symbiotic alien, which gives him superpowers), but it was exactly the right kind of B movie far for a lowkey Saturday night at home.
This month I seem to have watched my way through a lot of TV and films. I suspect this is due to a combination of cold/rainy/dark October weather keeping us indoors, and our closest local friends in Ely moving away, which has basically rendered our in-person social lives nonexistent.
This month, I've finished six TV series (while also being midway through many more).
The North Water is a grim historical miniseries set on a whaling ship in the nineteenth century. I'm not the only person who has compared it to The Terror — it's another story about violent, selfish nineteenth-century British men travelling to the harsh landscape of the Arctic, and suffering the consequences of their acquisitive rapaciousness. I'm not someone who needs all their fiction to be about fundamentally good people trying to do the right thing, but if all the characters in a work of fiction are irredeemable monsters, I need the work to be saying something more interesting than all men are beasts, and if you take them to a sufficiently harsh environment this beastly nature will reveal itself. Victor Kelleher has done this theme better, many many times, and he was writing dystopian novels for Australian teenagers in the 1980s and 1990s.
Lucifer probably needs no introduction at the point of its final season, and I wish I could say it finished on a high note. I was glad the show found a second home on Netflix, but this is possibly one of the few TV series that I prefer to hew to a more episodic rather than serialised format. I like it when it's case/monster-of-the week, and I'm less interested in the overarching mythology. And this final season involved time travel shenanigans, which for me are always a risky proposition. Creators need to be careful with time travel plots — because they can easily fall into a trap of rendering all character growth, and all character choices utterly meaningless. And when it comes to a show whose foundational principle is the importance of free will, that's a problem.
Brand New Cherry Flavour is a Netflix miniseries that is much more to my taste. It's an adaptation of a novel (which I hadn't read) set in 1990s Hollywood, a surreal revenge fantasy in which a young woman director pitching her first short film is betrayed by her potential producer and turns to the occult to get back at him. At this point, things degenerate into a claustrophic nightmare filled with body horror. The show does a great job at evoking both the look and feel of Hollywood in that era, and the look and feel of the visual media of that period. It even has a suitably 1990s thematic thread of young women seeking power in the occult and being ruined by it. I loved it, but heed my warning if you have a problem with visual gore.
Hollington Drive is a British crime drama, the next in a long line of such stories set in idyllic suburban locations whose charm (genteel wealth, everyone knows everyone) turns sinister and claustrophic when a murder rips the close-knit community apart. It doesn't do anything particularly groundbreaking With these concepts, but a strong central performance by Anna Maxwell Martin and a focus on the relationship between two adult sisters makes it worth watching.
Ridley Road is a BBC historical drama set in 1960s London, based on real events in which members of a Jewish antifascist organisation went undercover in the resurgent British fascist movement and gathered enough evidence of crimes being committed to put the movement's leader in prison. I assume the show takes some significant liberties with the experiences and identities of the real figures involved in all this, but it does a great job of evoking the look, feel, and political and cultural climate of the era, and it's obviously great (if terrifying) to watch the group of Jewish operatives outwit and take down a pack of violent fascists.
The Long Call is an adaptation of another Ann Cleeves (of Shetland fame) detective novel, and it has all the hallmarks of her work — haunted but fundamentally good people feel sad in picturesque British locations (in this case in Devon) while solving crimes. The detective in this case is a gay man in a stable and loving relationship, and, refreshingly, while he's haunted by his past (he's a survivor of a fundamentalist cult), unlike other tormented TV detectives he doesn't deal with his personal pain with alcohol, drugs, self-destructive behaviour or by destroying his relationships with everyone who cares about him. Instead, he hugs his husband or swims laps across the idyllic sea. It's a refreshing change!
I mentioned last week that we saw Dune, so I won't go over that again (except to say that my love for it has not abated). I've watched two other films this month:
The Truffle Hunters is a sweet-natured little documentary about the unbelievable market for truffles, and the eccentric community of ageing Italian men who — with their specially trained dogs — sniff out this expensive commodity and sell it to dealers (who then sell it on at eyewatering markups). There are intense rivalries (none of the eponymous truffle hunters reveal the exact location of their patches of forest to anyone else, the training of the dogs is a closely-guarded secret), there are surprising dangers (for reasons of secrecy, most of the hunters gather their truffles in the night, which for a bunch of men in their seventies and eighties is obviously less than ideal), and, most amusingly, the sales of truffles resemble shady back-alley drug deals. I loved every minute of this film!
Venom was a film I'd been avoiding due to my own personal irritation with migratory Tom Hardy fandom and its tendency to overhype every project he's ever involved with. (There's nothing really wrong with this fandom — all they are is loudly enthusiastic — they've just been annoying me ever since Inception was a thing, and they've made me unjustifiably wary of any media in which Hardy is involved.) In any case, Venom is exactly as silly as I expected (down-on-his luck journalist ends up infected with a sentient symbiotic alien, which gives him superpowers), but it was exactly the right kind of B movie far for a lowkey Saturday night at home.
no subject
Date: 2021-10-31 02:35 pm (UTC)Thanks for the heads up! You might enjoy A Call to Spy (2019)
"In the beginning of WWII, with Britain becoming desperate, Churchill orders his new spy agency—the Special Operations Executive (SOE)—to recruit and train women as spies. Their daunting mission: conduct sabotage and build a resistance. SOE's "spymistress," Vera Atkins (Stana Katic), recruits two unusual candidates: Virginia Hall (Sarah Megan Thomas), an ambitious American with a wooden leg, and Noor Inayat Khan (Radhika Apte), an Indian Muslim pacifist. Together, these women help to undermine the Nazi regime in France, leaving an unmistakable legacy in their wake. Inspired by true stories."
https://youtu.be/TbZgLKjrdnA
no subject
Date: 2021-11-02 03:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-11-02 03:50 pm (UTC)Warning that while some real wins are achieved, there are also some real tragedies that made me cry my eyes out
no subject
Date: 2021-10-31 04:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-11-02 03:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-31 04:42 pm (UTC)Hahaha I hadn't even realised Tom Hardy was in Inception (which I didn't think was as clever as it thought it was) but I did like him in Fury Road and enjoyed Venom very much. I liked how it played with self-image and power fantasy, and especially that it made clear Brock was Not Cool when he abused his fiance's IT access. Also Riz Ahmed made a great antagonist.
no subject
Date: 2021-11-02 03:57 pm (UTC)I think my issue might actually be more with Christopher Nolan, whose films, for the most part, I cannot stand. To this day, the only two times I can remember being visibly, apoplectically filled with rage in a cinema involved Nolan films — The Dark Knight, and Interstellar. When I watched the former, I realised very early on that it was basically telling its viewers to condone 'extraordinary rendition,' abuse of prisoners in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay and so on in the name of the 'war on terror,' and this horrfied and angered me. The latter film also had a theme that really enraged me (trying to remain and heal a damaged Earth is cowardly and unambitious, and we should all aspire to leave this planet behind, travel through space, and find a new planet to colonise and live in), and I remember that I was so visibly angry that my husband noticed and asked me if I was all right!
So poor old Tom Hardy had the misfortune to be in an overhyped Nolan film, pick up a vocal and enthusiastic fandom as a result, and I've been resentful of him ever since...
As you say, Venom is an enjoyable film. I agree with you about the ethics of Brock accessing his fiancée's work documents — I'm a former journalist and I was watching in horror thinking that is not how journalistic sources work!
no subject
Date: 2021-11-02 04:51 pm (UTC)Yes, I think Christopher Nolan is an anti-rec for me on a film.
no subject
Date: 2021-10-31 06:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-11-02 03:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-11-01 06:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-11-02 04:05 pm (UTC)I almost always dislike time travel shenanigans, and I really dislike fiction which renders its characters' past choices irrelevant, or hinges on characters making choices which functionally involve a memory wipe, so the ending of Lucifer was never really going to work for me. I'm glad you were happy enough with the ending though.
no subject
Date: 2021-11-05 07:21 am (UTC)Sadly true.
it felt like there was a lot of compromise on his part and way less so on hers.
And thru most of the show it felt like she didn't respect him.
I didn't like the time travel theme of S6 because that meant I was second-guessing everything through my first watch ("but which kind of time travel is this?"). And yeah, it messed with free will, but the show did keep pulling its punches about that so I wasn't too surprised. But it especially bugged me that the supposedly happy ending required one character to be miserably kept in the dark for years.
no subject
Date: 2021-11-01 06:25 pm (UTC)I like Anna Maxwell Martin, so I might try that one. And I didn't know what Ridley Road was about at all, but that is relevant to my interests and now I can't wait to watch it!
no subject
Date: 2021-11-02 04:06 pm (UTC)Exactly so!
I hope you enjoy Ridley Road and Hollington Drive (both of which I've just realised have street names as their titles).
no subject
Date: 2021-11-02 04:00 pm (UTC)Harriet (2019)
about Harriet Tubman. It's very good! Altho, again, some major wins, but also some very sad losses.
https://youtu.be/GqoEs4cG6Uw
no subject
Date: 2021-11-02 04:07 pm (UTC)