The first one was good but then they decided that they were making fucking harry potter but for assassins and it became an obvious pile of shit.

People are saying Rashomon, but I don't think that's what you're describing. Rashomon shows multiple narratives around an event, which is to say that it's not the same scene, it's a set of different stories around the same past event.

As far as other examples of what you're describing, it kind of sounds like a classic one is in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. We see a set of scenes partway through the film and then again toward the end in a way that recontextualizes them. In fact, the HP movies love this, with Snape's actions in the first movie being a good example.

It's a common horror tactic as well, with some of the Nightmare on Elm Street contrasting what a person perceives with how others see them responding. Saint Maud has a great example of this at the end as well. Though this technique, in which the same scene is shown from massively different (some of them very distorted) perspectives might be pushing the meaning of the post a bit far as well.

The last example I can think of is Inland Empire, in which the scenes of the movie kind of fold in on themselves as it progresses. It's hard to explain, but it basically sets up a number of ontological layers (the film, the film within the film, the film that the film within a film is based on, the person in the film watching the film in a theater, etc.) and connects them in various ways such that you see something that happened at one point of the movie from a very different perspective later.

Yes

Adaptation is the word there. It's not remaking a show.

What was this a "remake" of?

I was able to follow it without any issue because I had CC turned on. Without those, all of the jargon and names tossed at you are much harder to remember. So for example, if you see the queen's name in ep 1, it's pretty straightforward to connect the dots later in the show when they mention her in the past tense.

There is a middle ground between Season 1 of the Witcher in which they absolutely do have too many "proper nouns" introduced for most viewers, and then whatever it was that they gave us. The key is being a good writer, so, ya know...

The first season or two are much much more episodic. By the end, they are very much focused on season plots instead. It's still episodic in the way that shows like Breaking Bad will be very connected but each episode still has a focus and contained story.

Very similar to Justified in this respect imo

I'd highly recommend sticking with it. The first season is ok but can be silly sometimes (a lot of the Dutch plot lines can get that way) and it grows a lot after it.

Out of curiosity, what are the ethical guidelines that most govern your choices?

What is stopping you in this instance

>Literally one of the greatest shows of all time according to critics and viewers alike. But the first season was really "slow" and "boring."

Rewatch the first episode, and to an extent, the first season, and revisit this statement. Breaking Bad was screaming out of the gate.

There's a huge difference between something that starts slow and something that needs to "get better". Slow is fine if it's interesting. But if the show isn't good for a few episodes, regardless of pacing, I'm not going to waste the limited number of hours I have on this planet watching trash I dislike in the hopes that it will improve.

Justified

It punishes you so hard if you're not ready with the remote to skip it. Worst genre of music of all time.

I've always thought Le Samourai was its main inspiration

Kind of lose interest in it after seeing Homer Hickam's social media activities more recently. Dude pulled the ladder up after him big time

Well considering the Maldives is mentioned multiple times this season...

One of the craziest comments I saw in this sub a while back was a dude saying watching the show inspired him to join the Marines.

The Act of Killing is another. It is a documentary in which they interview people in a country where the (US supported) genocides have not only not been condemned, but the perpetrators are still living normal lives. They basically trick the perpetrators, who have largely avoided caring or thinking about it, into understanding the extent of what they've done. One of the most moving films I've ever seen.

You should see r/movies late at night. I don't follow many subs, so it completely dominates my frontpage "best" sort with 20 out of 25 posts being "What movies did everyone hate but you think are top 10?" or "Name a movie in which <very specific thing>"

It's always completely useless to comment in them because the OP never replies back and so I'm forced to switch to the "hot" sort.

I have no idea how you prevent it.

edit: Here's an example of my frontpage right now, and it's much worse at night

It is unlikely that you are being targeted. Reddit has a legion of ways to secretively remove or suppress posts that are applied haphazardly, as well as mods who will almost always remove posts once they hit r/all (if you don’t believe me, check out the redditminusmods subreddit). In this case, incompetence is more likely than malice. Looks like it is showing up fine now though

He contributes to the troubled teen industry. One in which kids are literally kidnapped from their homes and then dropped into facilities where they are tortured 24/7, including solitary confinement for 6+ months straight, for years. This is one example of the kind of thing he pushes. There is no way to tolerate such an industry or such a person.

Haven't seen Midnight Club yet, but I think Midnight Mass is on another level. It's not the acting, it's the writing. I will post a snippet from the script of episode 6 from Midnight Mass, in which the sheriff is asked to investigate a suspicious church, and, rather than simply say "there's no way these people who barely tolerate my religious beliefs would allow this", he sets off into this. And bear in mind this isn't even the stupidest monologue this episode, I'm just posting it because it doesn't really spoil anything and is easy to see how stupid it is without context. The actual stupidest monologue in the show is the one about Ignaz Semmelweis earlier in the episode.

Anyway, here's the sheriff's response that should have been two lines of dialogue:

---

What exactly are you asking of me?

I suppose I’m asking you to look into it.

Look into what, exactly?

Look into St. Patrick’s?

On… And just to be clear, on the basis that some of your mother’s blood tests got damaged?

It’s a lot to ask, I know.

Do you?

[Sarah sighs]

Do you?

[clicks tongue] Did I ever tell you why I moved here?

No. No, I don’t think you did.

Didn’t tell anybody, now that I think about it.

It’s almost as if nobody asked.

You know, I was, um, 21 when the Towers went down.

Watched it on TV in my dorm room just weepin’.

When I was a kid, I wasn’t religious at all, really.

But I went to the mosque that day, because they had a blood drive, and the line went for blocks.

I wanted to help.

I wanted to protect this country.

So I moved to New York and enrolled in NYPD training.

Now, some of my friends, they weren’t happy.

“NYPD is against us,” they’d say. But I’d tell them, “No. You’re wrong.”

“I’ll show them they don’t have to be afraid of us.”

“I’ll show them who we are.”

So I worked my way up.

You know, traffic, and translating and transcribing wiretaps, then Vice.

I get married. Ali is born, and I’m promoted again. Detective now.

Top secret security clearance for the joint terrorism task force.

I’m helping the FBI fight terrorists.

We’re taking collars. You know, petty stuff, pot, parking tickets and leaning on them hard if they’re Muslim.

“You know, we’ll drop the charge, help you out.”

“You go to the mosque and listen.”

I thought we were supposed to be fighting terrorists.

Not flipping some pothead student in Queens to spy on Americans.

So I complain.

Gently. One time.

Everything changed.

I was surveilled by other cops.

I mean, they even had an official file on me.

And not just me. See, like, after the Towers, Muslim officers were promoted fast. Especially if we knew the language, like, linguistic knowledge, cultural knowledge.

We were very desirable for that.

But it started to occur to them, with so many of us on the force, elevated to positions of real authority, what if that had been our plan all along?

What if we were interlopers?

What if we were infiltrators?

What if we were double agents? And they fucking panicked.

Internal Affairs was suddenly all over us. We were being followed.

We’re being recorded. Civilians too. Surveilled at mosques, cafes.

And suddenly I’m out of plain clothes and I’m back in uniform.

Night shift, street beat.

And more and more, I realize I’ve lost their trust.

I roll with it.

I keep my head high.

Dignity.

Dignity is a word my wife uses.

“Show them dignity.”

And then she’s diagnosed.

And she’s robbed of her dignity so fast.

And then she’s gone.

And I couldn’t…

Ali and I get as far away as we can. And I find this gig.

This little island.

So sleepy, it could be dead.

No elections, no staff. Just a tiny room at the back of a grocery store, and a bunch of fishermen without a notable incident of intentional violence in almost a century, and I beg for the post.

Dignity.

Ali is bored to tears.

But he’s safe.

And I still think I could maybe move the world that one millimeter.

You know, maybe here’s where we make a difference.

Not in the big city, but in this tiny village.

Win over the fucking PTA and call it a victory for Islam.

So I don’t intimidate.

I don’t overshare or overstep or intrude in any way.

I don’t even carry a gun.

And still…

Still…

Beverly Keane and a few others too look at me like I’m Osama bin-Fucking-Laden.

And you’d like me to investigate St. Patrick’s?

For what it’s worth, I want very much… very much to be wrong.

[Sarah sighs]

I thought it was great. Really fun kills that it set up well in most cases. I really dislike all the other movies, including the original, and so I can see why me liking it probably means fans of the series would have issues with it. My least favorite part of them is Michael Myers (yawn) and so Season of the Witch and this one are the standouts for me.

I think I laid it out pretty extensively there but the other reply to your comment sums it up. I’d also add that not only do they pretend to complete Frank’s books but they retcon the events of his first Dune book or two in order to shoehorn their characters into their in-betweenquels

The problem is that it's written in the same cookie cutter style as the rest. Every chapter follows a different character and ends right as it's getting interesting. It means that you're constantly given cliffhangers to keep you reading and by the time you finish it has become apparent that you've just been strung along without almost any payoff.

Their books are about 3 times as big as they need to be and pack way too much plot that ends up being largely irrelevant, with the end result being that it's hard to even remember what happened. Like one of those Netflix Marvel shows that stretched a great 2 hour movie into a middling 10 hour season of TV.

And finally, their books don't actually exist to tell standalone stories and rather exist to write plots that are justified by their eventual relevance to his father's much better books. This means they'll have half a dozen or more completely independent plots that never meet. The Butlerian Jihad books are the worst about this and would be improved by taking that different non-intersecting plots and giving each their own book that spans the full time range. As it stands, the reader gets 100 lb of mediocre plot dumped across half a dozen or more completely different plot lines with no indication that it will ever converge into some actual coherence.

>We should just all be thankful that HBO is not using their work to make a show about the Butlerian Jihad.

Yeah, as written by these guys, those books would be expensive as hell to film and absolutely not worth it.

Like trying to compare erotic Spongebob fan fiction to The Brothers Karamazov. They were barely even written by Brian Herbert. A vast majority of the writing was done by Kevin J Anderson, who is a complete hack. He does his writing by taking long walks and just freestyling the prose into a microphone, which he then transcribes when he gets home with only a bit of tweaking. Everything about them is terrible, there is not a single redeeming quality.