What a movie though. Listening to the soundtrack right now, and even that is incredibly good. There's such a crazy balance of big sweeping scale and moments of quiet little melancholy or warmth.

IMDB is absolutely useless for anything with a woman or anybody not white in the marketing. The split second some Youtube grifter plugs that title into his madlibbed ragebait for the week, it's over.

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here.

Maybe I'm unreasonably cynical, but that whole thing felt very staged to me.

Edit- Curious thing to be getting downvoted for. Everything around Cruise is notoriously stage-managed and controlled with a hermetic seal, but the one thing that happens to leak is a near-perfectly composed "blow up" that casts him in a largely positive light and emphasises how Covid conscious the production is, when it was still getting quite a bit of scrutiny for proceeding at all?

It's a pretty valid eyebrow-raise even if you don't agree.

If the Tories were that hated they wouldn't keep getting in. Which was a similar dynamic to Savage's heyday.

Think about how much gnashing of teeth there was over BBC not being deferential enough, or the clear moves to punish Channel 4 for factually unflattering reporting.

Several tweets saying there'd be uproar if that was broadcast today, and it's sadly true.

Mad to think that about that, of all O’Grady’s stuff.

Everything about her was perfect. The ever present cigarette hanging from her fingers, the leopard print, the just-slightly-heightened wig, the just-slightly-exaggerated accent, the pure vinegar of her tone about everything... Just magic.

O'Grady became a domestic household name in his later years, but it’s hard to capture now just how bold a figure he was back in the day. The Lily Savage persona owed a little to Panto, sure, but she was a very distinctly and uniquely British drag character, and as strange as it is to think I genuinely think she was good for LGBT representation in media. Your dad might think it's weird to see a guy in a dress, but he can't deny how funny some incredibly brutal joke about some public figure or other was.

Savage is credited with starting at least one riot and would have eaten most modern Queens for tea, incidentally.

I think a lot of folks have missed the significance of the fact Crozier is Irish. He is not British, and England is not his home. He is a colonial subject, from a country that was ruthlessly colonised and exploited to prop up the navy he's part of. The exploitation of Ireland's ecosystem for the sake of the British Empire is, at that point in history, on the brink of triggering an apocalyptic famine that will kill about an eighth of the Irish population while food is still being exported, and the Royal Navy was a major priority for those exports.

He doesn't just speak his coloniser's language, he would have to learn to speak it in his coloniser's accent for a chance to succeed within its machine.

He isn't just in hiding from the Naval Officers, he's renouncing his part in what they represent.

Edit

Btw I can't tell if you're aware, but there were reports of a single white man living with some of the Inuit some time afterwards, from both European and Inuit accounts, and that man was speculated to be Francis Crozier, who would have been among the best equipped of the crew to adapt.

https://historyhubulster.co.uk/francis-crozier/

I liked a lot of it. My big problems were how distractingly bad/cheap the newscasts were, and the fact the concussed husband had barely any personality. The other guy had to pretty much carry the whole movie - and which I have to say, he did no problem - but it diminishes the impact of the ending a lot.

I can imagine believing this if you watch a ton of bad boilerplate TV, but as of 2023, ChatGPT is still very regularly producing the text equivalent of 7 fingered hands and a general sense of "uncanny valley" in the output.

Something about Gen Q didn't click. The OG L Word was never exactly Shakespeare but there was a blackly comic wit in it not unlike OITNB that kind of carried it, and this just didn't have that.

I don't use them as a measure of much but I enjoy watching them and the way they serve as a diving board for chatter about the year's media.

I think it's monumentally unlikely... but not quite impossible.

Edit - I think Disney could genuinely be keeping its options open, because we're at such a weird fork in the road for streaming etc

>Women's rights and you can forget about minortiy rights.

>Both concepts require a very strong government and have to be institutionalized.

>Neither are 'natural,' in fact the opposite is natural: tribalism and domination of the weak by the strong

Yeah... nah. This isn't true. It's modern mythology parroted by dudebros who fail so badly in society they assume they're just better suited to a world without it, but with little to back it up.

We have remarkably little evidence of the kind of constant conflict doofuses assume to be our natural state. In fact, we have more evidence of art than of conflict in prehistory. And we have a very significant body of evidence to tell us that prehistoric societies - who would have been subsistence hunter gatherers, relatively comparable to a post apocalyptic society - cared for their aged, disabled and vulnerable.

So every day life, for a primitive human, wasn't the kind of Mad Max all against all stuff people want to think. Maybe that changed in a crisis, or maybe not, but there are plenty of examples of disasters and collapses even in recent history where people took care of each other in spite of institutional failures/absence/apathy.

Let's think about a fairly recent situation of massive crisis for another reason though - WW2 was a notable period of advancement for women and minoritised groups, because the stakes were so high we needed everyone. We couldn't afford to use institutions and government to penalize those people, and many minority groups spoke of the difference afterwards when the emergency stepped down and they were sent back to the figurative back of the bus again.

On the other hand, the rights of women and minorities were seldom under more threat than they have been under Fascist governments, who are strictly institutionalized governments.

So it's more complicated on both sides than the scenario you've assumed. On the one hand, a more organized society just made it easier to screw the vulnerable on an industrial scale; on the other hand, the emergency meant the organization used to screw the vulnerable elsewhere suddenly no longer had the luxury to continue doing it. Many tribal societies colonized by "strong government" states suffered set backs to social rights their members had before (women were more independent day to day in several places before Britain conquered them, for example)

But going back to our "natural" state, the fact is, we're evolutionarily built to be lovers, not fighters. Among our closest relatives in nature are the bonobos, an often matriarchal social animal that bonds and resolves disputes mostly by fucking or masturbating. We are related equally closely to the more aggressive chimps, sure, but we're physically far more different. Chimps are incredibly strong and have ferocious teeth, and we've got neither.

Think about it in fact - what predator animal do you think you could overpower unarmed in a fight?

Fucking nothing. We're not stronger than bears, we're not toothier than wolves or clawier than lions. We can't outswim sharks or out run cheetahs. We can't bite crocodiles back or hold our own against hippos.

We should be fucked. But we're not. The reason we run the world isn't because we're especially naturally aggressive. It's because we have big complicated brains and walk upright, which means we can use and develop sophisticated tools, and we can adapt and communicate with far greater complexity than any other animal bar none. Nothing. There is nothing else on earth that can outclass us in terms of capacity to collaborate, and that alone makes us the dominant species on the planet. We are so finely tuned towards collaboration, in fact, that socially isolating a human causes them measurable physical harm.

Those two traits also make childbirth very dangerous compared to other species though - those big baby noggins get stuck in the narrow pelvis we need to stand up - and child rearing incredibly costly - it takes forever for a human child to become independent because it does a much greater proportion of its development outside the womb than most animals. That means the success, of our entire species, for thousands of years, has come on foot of the fact that people unable to fend for themselves for roughly a year (for the mother) and at least a decade (for a child) can rely on the adults around them to care for them.

That is what has made us the fittest, and it's why all those beardy survivalist end timer loons are going to die of a twisted ankle the first chance they get because they forgot they need to eat every day and sleep for about a third of it when they were choosing to go it alone. The idea of humans as selfish, rugged individualists is, and has always been, nonsense. We're simply not built for it.

If you were in a tiny post apocalyptic group of survivors and one of the others is from a demographic group you don't like but is otherwise pulling his weight, you're not going to send him packing or hurt him, are you? You can't afford to, you need his help. Are you going to mistreat the women in the group?

Why? What do you do the day after that, when you all still have to live with each other, in the absence of anyone else?

And can you sleep with one eye open...?

I think Cocaine Bear would make for a more fun crowd experience.

Man, that lighting. It was SUCH a good looking show. It felt expensive, in a way that's so rare now.

Damn, Three's Company coming out of the corner swinging so far.

The thing that really struck me about it - and made it feel way too weird for Network tv - was that for a clearly biblically infused story, it doesn't really feel like it's trying to sell you a "message" at all. It feels like what those mythologies would feel like to the figures in them. When weird shit happens to you, personally, in the Book of Samuel or whatever, you just have to kind of roll with it, because you live in a world where God himself crowned the king you're paying tax to. It's not a fable, just matter of fact.

It's unusual, because it feels like treating the human, political bible stuff the way shows usually prefer to treat all the angels and demons stuff, or like a big Viking saga or something.

I think it just depends on how well it's executed. In the case of TLOU, I think they could have done a wee bit more to make it clear why they're showing you what they're showing you. I think there is a very good reason for it, but that's not necessarily obvious to most viewers yet so I understand some of the frustration. (But I think people will look back differently on it when they see the big picture. I've mentioned it elsewhere, but imho audiences are far less willing to trust a show to pay off on something like that than they used to be)

Station Eleven did a lot of flashbacking back and forth, but it alternated every episode - one ep would be set largely in year zero, and the next in year twenty - and the eps were released in clusters of 3 or 2 so you got a dash of both every week. I also think it was quite a bit more deft at making both timelines feel "present", with tricks like phantom audio from one timeline bleeding into another, or Kirsten's sometimes rapidly intercut memories vs current experience.

I find the other "dramatic flashback" format way more fucking annoying, where they show you something crazy in the first scene and then flashback to showing you all the steps it took to get there.

Absolutely. If a streamer made this now people would go wild for it.

Such a weird, cool concept to have gotten made at all though.

For folks who haven't seen it - it's a very loose rework of the story of the biblical David's rise to kingship, set in a sort of monarchy ruled modern US-esque state. Lots of political manoeuvring and weird omens, with Ian McShane as the current king. Somebody declares war on God and means it very literally.

There is absolutely no way Halt and Catch Fire would have made it out of S1 and into high gear. I'm not sure Buffy would have made it either.

At least one showrunner, the Warrior Nun guy, said he had to argue for the final (post credit) scene because Netflix wanted him to end on the previous one, which would have left the show cancelled on a cliffhanger instead of an open ending.

So it's something Netflix still seems to be responsible for.

For All Mankind gets a lot of recs for this purpose.

Character: "I can't believe it's come down to begging."

Narrator: "Please tell your friends about this show."