The Movie (and TV show) Watching Thread

[Benjamin Frank 2.0]

I prefer older programs, but this can be newer. Does anybody know of any scripts that were done by more than one T.V show?

I ask this because I was watching the Columbo episode from 1990 'Uneasy Lies the Crown' and it had been done previously as the second to last episode of McMillan and Wife called 'Affair of the Heart.' Both were based on the same script written by Steven Bochco.

I'm not referring to different T.V shows that use the same tropes, though that's an interesting topic for discussion as well, but shows based on the same script.

I know that the first half dozen or so episodes of The Office were taken directly from the British version, and there have been others that have done that. I know of one episode of Three's Company from the 1970s that was directly taken from the British show it was based on called Man About the House. In that case, the differences were interesting. The British episode was more subtle all be it still a farce, while the American episode was broad comedy.

The reason I'm curious is because my entertainment tastes go way back and I really like old radio plays, and different radio programs adapting episodes from the same source was very common.

For anybody interested in the classic science fiction writers of the 1950s, I highly recommend the radio programs X-1 and Dimension X.

[Meclazine for Israel]

Detective Columbo

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=612446029845289

[Farmlands]

Got reccomended this Youtube video with a still of a woman on a balcony at night illuminated by fireworks. Many people in the comments were talking about how beautiful and depressing the movie in question, A Silent Voice was. Since psychological drama is my favorite genre, I watched it.

Despite more relevance in recent years, I don't think too many media openly deals with the subject of depression/suicide, and if they do, it's not in a realistic manner, so it was a new experience for me. I'm glad I watched it, it's beautifully animated and the situations presented real.

One of those great surprises that I had no idea about beforehand, and glad I know of now. If nothing more, I think the theme of hitting rock bottom and slowly, but steadily turning yourself back around is a very powerful one.

[John Dule]

Some thoughts on American Fiction, which just went into wide release in theaters:


As a parody of the white guilt industrial complex, American Fiction has abundant material to work with. This is both a blessing and a curse. One might think that a world in which liberal white women pay $2500 to be told they're racist at a dinner table is ripe for satire, but in truth it's difficult to make sharp satire about something that is already ridiculous. For this reason, American Fiction faces an immense challenge: satire requires exaggeration, yet how can you exaggerate white guilt, which has no limits and knows no fence?

From the first scene, the movie is clearly unsure about how to approach this problem. The film opens with Thelonious Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), a literature professor, attempting to teach a class on a short story entitled "The Artificial n." A white student (of course, with blue hair) takes offense at the word's usage and storms out of the class, which causes Ellison to be professionally disciplined. If the satire here sounds obvious, that's because it is-- the entire sequence can be boiled down to the oft-repeated trite boomer observation that "you can't say anything these days." But that's not American Fiction's fault. When it tries to exaggerate the absurdities of modern liberalism, it inevitably feels too blunt. When it attempts subtlety, it becomes tamer than real life and thus feels like it's pulling its punches (not the mark of an effective parody).

And therein lies the problem with making satire in a post-subtextual world. The film's argument is that a vein of black cultural output exists for white consumption, and that white audiences heap praise upon these books and films to assuage their own feelings of collective guilt. But we already know this to be true, because we live in a world where the number-one bestseller a few years ago was a book called "How To Be An Antiracist." How can you parody something like that? The cover of the book tells you everything you need to know about why it exists, the cultural role it occupies, and the person who bought it. There's no subtext to dig into!

For these reasons, most of American Fiction's cultural observations are superficial. Still, the movie is funny. I saw this film in a theater in Marin County, California, surrounded by elderly white liberals, and their (slightly anxious) laughter was infectious. Jeffrey Wright is an excellent straight man, and his reserved intellectualism is the perfect foil for the mindlessly sycophantic white publishers who fawn over his book. One moment, in which a white author interrupts Wright to inform him that "we need to listen to black voices," got a particularly big laugh. The movie is at its funniest when it abandons subtlety, accepts that it's going after low-hanging fruit, and simply has fun at the expense of white suburbanites who think that changing their Facebook profile pictures to black squares is the modern equivalent of marching at Selma.

But regrettably, the movie is not satisfied with just being a parody. American Fiction's core thesis is that "stereotypically black" stories in media ignore the diversity of the African-American experience-- and to combat this erasure, it tries to tell its own black stories. Numerous subplots are devoted to Ellison's mother, brother, sister, father, girlfriend, maid, and even his maid's boyfriend. The film badly miscalculates by devoting far too much time to these subplots, and for large chunks of its runtime, it actually loses track of its main plot in favor of Ellison's family troubles. I understand that the goal here was to showcase facets of black America that you wouldn't find on BET, but the script accomplishes nothing by elevating these mundane slice-of-life black stories at the expense of the very funny, very original black story that audiences paid to see. As a result, the movie is a chimera of social satire and family drama that never fully comes together.

American Fiction is a mess, and it leaves a lot on the table. But it's also funny and well-acted, and the targets of its comedy certainly deserve to be mocked (of course, they'll obsequiously laugh at themselves while watching this movie anyway, which makes the whole joke a bit impotent). The film's biggest missteps are ultimately forgettable, while its best moments of satire have the potential to be remembered for years to come. What's unfortunate is that so much of its successes have to do with its premise and not its execution.

Heat - I was honestly disappointed with this one. I can't even say that the film was just mediocre, it's a movie that has a bunch of really great scenes (coffee shop, airport shootout) mixed with a lot of terrible scenes (any scene with Robert De Niro's love interest, who is one of the least believable characters in all of film history). There were a lot of plot points that went nowhere (Waingro being a serial killer) or came out of nowhere (Al Pacino's stepdaughters suicide attempt), that made me think this story would have been better served as a miniseries.

Yeah, I completely agree on this one. I was extremely disappointed by it, and I remember all the female characters in the film having absolutely awful dialogue. Love interests in cop movies are usually pretty one-note as it is, but this character was exceptionally poor.

[Sestak]

but the script accomplishes nothing by elevating these mundane slice-of-life black stories at the expense of the very funny, very original black story that audiences paid to see.

Couldn’t this be read as a bit of a meta-point to the film? The former are the same kinds of stories Ellison is trying to write about, while the latter is (admittedly a more bespoke version of) a heavily “racialized” narrative that ultimately lets non-black libs feel good about themselves for being an empathetic ally.

I don’t necessarily disagree with you that it doesn’t end up working - I think I was happier with the family stuff than you were but it definitely could have been done better - but I do think that the dichotomy is intrinsic to how Jefferson envisioned this film.

[John Dule]

but the script accomplishes nothing by elevating these mundane slice-of-life black stories at the expense of the very funny, very original black story that audiences paid to see.

Couldn’t this be read as a bit of a meta-point to the film? The former are the same kinds of stories Ellison is trying to write about, while the latter is (admittedly a more bespoke version of) a heavily “racialized” narrative that ultimately lets non-black libs feel good about themselves for being an empathetic ally.

I don’t necessarily disagree with you that it doesn’t end up working - I think I was happier with the family stuff than you were but it definitely could have been done better - but I do think that the dichotomy is intrinsic to how Jefferson envisioned this film.

The effectiveness of that is going to heavily depend upon whether the family drama is interesting to the audience-- and I'm generally not a fan of slice-of-life drama that has nothing larger to say. And the movie is going to be about race no matter what, given the overarching premise. Trying to subvert that fact with an uninteresting series of racially neutral subplots (none of which have any payoff) almost made it feel like it was running away from the social commentary it had promised to make.

Also, I might be misremembering this, but I don't think Ellison was writing about "black stories" at all. He tells the bookstore employee that "the blackest thing about this book is the ink," which I took to mean that it was just pure literature and wasn't connected to his own experiences at all.

[T'Chenka]

Saw American Fiction last night. Very good film. Dule's issues with the film are my issues as well, but I think they're way way smaller issues than Dule thinks they are.

Strong 4 / 5 stars, close to 4.5 / 5

[Sestak]

So at long last, with the film making its first theatrical rerun, I watched Oppenheimer for the first time in San Francisco last week.

The film is technically brilliant and emotionally well-constructed. Visually and sonically brilliant - seeing this in IMAX 70mm did wonders, it really is breathtaking. Christopher Nolan's tendency to play with chronology in his screenplays comes out in its very best here - the timeline of events is perfectly clear and you essentially know what's coming in each of the timeframes presented, but the plot is so well-structured that this does nothing to lower the dramatic tension. The performances are also excellent. Cillian Murphy gives a stellar performance in the lead, surrounded by an ensemble full of big names who all fall into their roles quite well.

In terms of awards, this would (among films I've seen so far) easily top my list for cinematography, sound, score, and best ensemble. Possibly editing as well, though Killers of the Flower Moon is quite close for me. I would give KOTFM the edge in picture, direction, and lead acting, but I wouldn't be remotely unhappy with Oppenheimer taking home all these awards (which it seems it has a decent chance at doing).

There is one award category, however, in which the film seems to be on pace to win everywhere that I take issue with: Robert Downey Jr.'s supporting role as Lewis Strauss. Quite honestly, I felt that it was nothing special. It was alright, sure, but nothing more than that. He's just an actor that everyone loves because he was Iron Man and now that he's returned to more serious films - and is still a quite capable actor - everyone seems to be rushing to give him awards. The thing is, despite a lot of talk about how different this role was - it really didn't feel that way to me? He essentially plays Strauss as Iron Man if he had a little more political acumen and was a little more reserved and patient. At least Mark Ruffalo's role in Poor Things (which I believe is getting brownie points for the same reason) is genuinely very different than the stuff he was doing in his Marvel years. The only time Downey really gets to shine is...

spoilers follow for Oppenheimer (C. Nolan, 2023)

Spoiler alert! Click Show to show the content.

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...in the ending, when Strauss has a gradual emotional breakdown as his confirmation process crashes. The problem is that to reach these dramatic "Oscar-y" acting moments, Nolan sets up this incredibly hamfisted dialogue with this congressional staffer (of Nolan's own creation) played by Alden Ehrenreich. The character basically ends up continually repeating and stating the obvious, things that the audience will have, for the most part, already figured out, just to allow Strauss the opportunity to make his various deranged responses. By the end, Ehrenreich is basically narrating the moral of the story and scolding Strauss for his actions, like some kind of self-insert of Nolan's. I don't know if this was done because he thought the audience wouldn't be able to figure out his intended message, or if he simply wanted the audience to get the visceral satisfaction of seeing the bad guy getting a stern talking-to. Either way, it is cheap and bad; we don't need Nolan to literally state "what if Oppenheimer and Einstein were talking about something more important", we can just let Strauss say his paranoid bit and then end the film revisiting the conversation and everyone would get it. Really, this ending feels like an incredibly stark departure from the rest of the movie - not to mention some basic principles of filmmaking, show not tell, etc. (Quite honestly I was fully ready to say this movie was also my preferred choice for best screenplay until this portion completely ruined that for me). I left the theater half suspecting that the ending was deliberately constructed the way it was in order to get Downey awards. But the sleight-of-hand, if one can call it that, used to reach that point are so clunky that it significantly undercut the performance for me.

Even accepting all of his work in the ending, his performance is not in the same stratosphere as De Niro's, nor the next two best male supporting performances of last year (Dominic Sessa in The Holdovers and Charles Melton in May December). Honestly, I wouldn't even consider it the strongest male supporting performance in this film - arguably Matt Damon was more solid and more convincing in the role he was given. But I guess we've come to expect that sort of thing from him.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

The Ted series is great. I'm only three episodes in but they're all top notch.

What's great is that it's actually a domestic family sitcom about all of the characters, including the parents and the live-in cousin, not just Ted and John's wacky hijinks, although those are prominent and hilarious too.

[Progressive Pessimist]

I watched 'Saltburn' yesterday night, and I think it's time for a shameless Letterboxd plug for my review:

https://letterboxd.com/doctornarp/film/saltburn/

Long story-short: I liked it well enough, but found that other films did what it attempted to do better and less needlessly gross. Also Barry Keoghan just irks the living s*** out of me, intentionally and not.

[GoTfan]

The Ted series is great. I'm only three episodes in but they're all top notch.

What's great is that it's actually a domestic family sitcom about all of the characters, including the parents and the live-in cousin, not just Ted and John's wacky hijinks, although those are prominent and hilarious too.

So it is meant as a prequel to the films then?

[President Johnson]

Yesterday watched the brandnew movie Society of the snow, a Spanish, Uruguayan and Chilean production that features the crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 in 1972, in which a rugby team survived in the Andes for 72 days. I would give the film a positive rating, especially for the insane real story behind it, though I personally prefer the 1993 US version Alive!

[Landslide Lyndon]

I saw the Beekeeper yesterday and while I'm not aware of the political leanings of the people who made the movie, I'll be very surprised if they weren't "inspired" even a little by the Hunter Biden affair.

[President Johnson]

Was anyone aware that former Los Angeles Mayor and now US Ambassador to India Eric Garcetti played some smaller roles on TV? I recently started to watch the TV series SWAT (that plays in LA) and he appeared in a minor role there (Season 6 in Episode 1 from 2017). I was first confused because I knew this guy as a politician and then thought maybe the actor is just someone that looked similar. But it was indeed him, even while serving as mayor. Really kind of odd, especially that he didn't play himself.

[Benjamin Frank 2.0]

I don't know if I reviewed this previously. Different political angles for different people.
The Wonder Boys (2000 film) - Michael Douglas, Tobey Maguire, Robert Downey Jr.

'Woke' left/progressive review: 3 white men are celebrated for embracing their white male privilege.

Social conservative/moralist review: 3 people engage in immoral behavior but face no negative consequences for their actions.

Spoiler: Michael Douglas' character technically faces negative consequences: he gets fired from his job as a creative writing professor and his manuscript gets destroyed. However:
1.It's quite clear he had come to hate the job and wanted out (and he doesn't seem to have any financial repercussions at the end.)

2.His manuscript was destroyed because it was approaching 2,000 pages which kind of suggests his problem to begin with.

3.It's made clear that his writing career is going to be revived by his writing of a fictional account of the weekend portrayed in the film.

[John Dule]

Since it was nominated for BP, I watched the Barbie movie last night. It was funny at points, but I honestly didn't like the ending at all. I'm not sure what the message was supposed to be about male/female relations-- it seemed almost pessimistic about our ability to put aside our differences and treat one another as equals, and that left a bad taste in my mouth. Maybe there's something I'm not understanding about it, but I'd rate it as mediocre for that reason. The jokes were also pretty hit-and-miss.

The final line of the movie is also extremely dumb. I don't know if that was supposed to be a subversion of "girl power" tropes or if it was genuine, but either way it didn't work.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

As I've said before it might surprise you to hear this but Bismarck has a very very good theater, in fact probably my favorite one that's still open (obvious disclaimer that I've never even been to, much less been to a movie theater in NYC or Los Angeles), so I always try to see a movie there whenever I'm here. Last weekend I saw The Beekeeper...it's a pretty standard Jason Statham movie and provides exactly what you'd expect from it, but it's done so well. Probably much better than the supposed atrocity that was The Expendables 4 (which I never saw because the reviews and word of mouth was so bad), the plot is very standard stuff, retired badass guy lives a simple life and gets drawn back into action, in this case he's working as a literal beekeeper, and what sets him into action is his landlady commits suicide after losing all her assets to a phishing scam...but what follows after that is a ridiculous conspiracy that it does so well. Compared to John Wick with both the premise and something simple exposing a massive underworld. Sort of the type of movie often dumped in January but not because it wasn't any good but because it shouldn't be overshadowed.

[GoTfan]

Anyone else looking forward to Dune Part II?

[Progressive Pessimist]

Anyone else looking forward to Dune Part II?

It's probably the only movie I'm anticipating this year so far.

[Virginiá]

Anyone else looking forward to Dune Part II?

oh god yes

Still annoyed they kicked it back months just because of the strike. The movie was already done, and they didn't need to wait this long just to have the cast actively promote it.

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

Since it was nominated for BP, I watched the Barbie movie last night. It was funny at points, but I honestly didn't like the ending at all. I'm not sure what the message was supposed to be about male/female relations-- it seemed almost pessimistic about our ability to put aside our differences and treat one another as equals, and that left a bad taste in my mouth. Maybe there's something I'm not understanding about it, but I'd rate it as mediocre for that reason. The jokes were also pretty hit-and-miss.

The final line of the movie is also extremely dumb. I don't know if that was supposed to be a subversion of "girl power" tropes or if it was genuine, but either way it didn't work.

No, you’re not missing anything.  It’s a dull, unremarkable, and decidedly meh film at best.

[GoTfan]

Grant (2020 miniseries)

America loves its self-made man stories, so it's a wonder why this one isn't being extolled from end-to-end, though I can understand why southern states wouldn't.

Ulysses S Grant's reputation has been a grossly maligned one with the rise of the Lost Cause myth. He was characterised as a drunkard, a butcher of a General who only defeated Robert E Lee by numbers, and a hopelessly corrupt President who did everything short of outright robbing the United States.

There have been recent attempts to correct Grant's reputation, of which one was Ron Chernow's biography called Grant, upon which this miniseries is based. Strictly speaking though, this is a docudrama, mixing highly detailed dramatic scenes with various interviews with historians and military figures to analyse Grant's campaigns and Presidency. Still, it is nice to see the History Channel show some actual history for a change.

We already know that Grant was the man who saved the Union, but what a lot of us might not know is that the man certainly was not from the same patrician class as the Lees. He was born in Ohio, and lived in Illinois most of his life. He despised his father's work as a tanner, but inherited many of his father's views on slavery, and later got an appointment to West Point because of his father. He graduated middle of his class, and served with valour in the Mexican-American War.

He did fall on hard times after this, and was at one point reduced to selling firewood to support his family. One thing I personally was unaware of was that Grant was given a slave as a wedding gift by his wife's family. my opinion of the man would've been coloured by this, had I then not immediately learnt that when in the depths of poverty, he gave the slave his freedom when selling him would've lifted his family from it.

The miniseries then chronicles his various campaigns in the Civil War, of which his brilliant victory at Vicksburg is given particular notice. A lot of attention is paid to how Grant is the proto-World War 1 general, successfully managing to push Lee relentlessly though a grasp of grand strategy and logistics that Lee simply did not have.

The series also paints his efforts after the war and as president in a new light. A man genuinely committed to civil rights for African-Americans and even Native Americans, which was rare at the time. He smashed the Ku Klux Klan and in many ways, was the first civil rights President. The series does not gloss over his flaws though; Grant is depicted as being far too naive and trusting to have ever been a good politician. As it was put in the HBO series Rome, "That man turns loyalty into a vice".

The interviews are excellent as well, ranging from academic historians, to military leaders, to tour guides at various parks. They all add the necessary context needed to see Grant in the light he really was. Honestly, I was completely unaware of just how highly regarded Grant still is in military and African-American circles, though that is mainly down to my own ignorance.

In a docudrama, actors' performances are usually secondary to the provided information, and that's still the case here. However, the selection of Justin Salinger, a little known English character actor to play Grant was an inspired one. He does anchor the whole thing, and is clearly put up as the face of the series. A proper biopic of Grant is long overdue, and when it happens, Salinger should get first dibs on playing him.

The series is a fantastic one, all told. The Lost Cause has unfairly painted Grant as an uncaring man who was hopelessly corrupt, drunk 24 hours a day and did nothing but hurl his men at defences without caring for their lives. History on Grant is being corrected, and we are all the better for it.

This man, who came from a hard-scrabble background and had almost no prospects for the future, executed one of the most brilliant military campaigns of all time at Vicksburg. He commanded the army that defeated Robert E Lee and saved the Union. As President, he fought like hell to ensure a solid Reconstruction, broke the back of the KKK, and managed to avert a full-blown constitutional crisis in 1876. As a man, he freed the one slave he owned when the money he could've made by selling him would've changed his life, and held on just long enough by sheer force of will to complete his memoirs.

He is not without his faults. Grant was simply too trusting to be a good politician, and more unscrupulous people took advantage of his nature. It's a sad indictment of politics that a man like Grant, who had the fundamental human qualities that should've made him a great President were the same ones that tore his administration apart.

At the end of the day though, can it really be argued that Ulysses S Grant is anything other than one of America's greatest national heroes?

This miniseries does Grant's legacy justice, and I hope will be part of the course correction Civil War history is undergoing right now.

[Sestak]

Watched Anatomy of a Fall last night. Spectacular film. No real notes. Not gonna say anything more about it. Go watch it.

[Alben Barkley]

The average fan of Harold and Maude:

1) Owns at least one top hat
2) Describes himself as an "Anglophile" because he can quote Monty Python and the Holy Grail verbatim
3) Wears eyeshadow for high school theater classes unsolicited
4) Treats Halloween costumes like a competitive sport
5) Has never been diagnosed with a mental illness, but secretly romanticizes the idea of having one (a cool one like multiple personalities or schizophrenia, not generalized anxiety disorder)
6) Got into steampunk after it became cool and stuck with it long after it wasn't anymore
7) Owns a leather aviator cap with goggles; has never flown a plane
8) Has a stupid favorite flavor of pie (probably huckleberry)
9) Owns at least thirty different mugs, none of which match and half of which are in the sink with teabags in them
10) Read either The Stranger or The Sorrows of Young Werther at the age of 15 and used that as the foundation to restructure his entire personality
11) Has at least four house plants, all of which are dying of neglect
12) Manages a checkout counter at a grocery store, but aspires to one day manage a checkout counter at a vinyl record store
13) Thinks Humboldt County, California is the epicenter of civilization
14) Imagines he would be good at whittling; has never tried it
15) At least once in his life, has moved the Bible to the "fiction" section of Barnes & Noble
16) Owns a pipe because he thinks it would be cool to smoke out of a pipe (doesn't smoke)
17) Thinks that bluntly oversharing inappropriate personal information in a deadpan tone is a fun personality quirk
18) Owns nunchaku, and will insist on correcting you if you refer to them as "nunchucks"
19) Bathes irregularly
20) Has a hamster with a name like Skeletor or something

I do not say any of this to be mean. I just call it like I see it.

Believe it or not, my high school girlfriend recommended that movie to me. And frankly upon watching it, I started to have doubts about our compatibility lol. No I kid…. mostly. It’s fine for what it is I guess but I don’t think I would ever watch it again. (And indeed I haven’t since then.) Don’t get the whole cult following around it.

But speaking of 70s or at least 70s-feeling movies, I just watched The Holdovers finally and THAT movie I f—king loved. I did NOT expect to like it nearly as much as I did going in. I laughed often and goddamn it, there may have even been a tear or two that welled up in my eyes at certain parts. “They don’t make ‘em like this anymore” was my immediate reaction to the film, except of course they finally did. Wow. This is the kind of movie, in a sea of movies I find mostly to be either brain dead tripe or pretentious tripe, I have been looking for. Loved it. Won’t be upset at all if Giamatti beats Murphy for the Best Actor Oscar. He absolutely earned it. Probably tops Sideways as my favorite movie from both Giamiatti and Payne as well, though it’s close.

[quesaisje]

Is anyone else watching the latest season of True Detective?

It's working for me, both as a new story and

Spoiler alert! Click Show to show the content.

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an increasingly direct sequel to the first season.

I'm using the spoiler tag because a decade later, and with a dramatic shift in characters and setting, this was a compelling as a gradual reveal over the first couple of episodes.