Just wanted to revisit this. We just finished watching Reply 1988 which we found utterly spellbinding. I’d like to revisit it at some time. It’d be interesting to see it with all the Netflix license-based censoring restored. Thankfully once you’d got used to there being no sound audible to the audience when they’re watching TV, it ultimately didn’t dampen the experience.
The thing now is What Next? We started Reply 1997 and after a couple of episodes it’s just not hitting the same notes at all. It’s just people being horrible to each other with none of the warmth and sentimentality. So any other K-dramas on Netflix to recommend?
Watched About Time yesterday, with Bill Nighy and Rachel McAdams among others, lovely British comedy, with a touch of “sci-fi”. Sweet and heartwarming, definitely recommended.
The premise of Mort is that a boy becomes the apprentice to the anthropological personification of death. Almost the entire text consists of Mort talking with Death, performing the functions of Death, and fucking things up by abusing the powers of Death. There is nothing else in there but the “Death angle”. It would be easier to re-make Les Miserables without misery, The Great Escape without prisoners, or War and Peace without war or peace.
A friend recommended it to me while I was badly depressed after my mother had died and I had had to have my dog put down on Christmas Eve. I nearly didn’t make it through the first ten minutes.
I love how the first 10 minutes of Up, which involves almost no speech whatsoever, is a better love story and drama than a good 2/3rds of full length, multi-million dollar films.
Up and Wall-E are two animated kids films that I find very affecting. Both have plenty of dialog-free action. Wall-E is another good love story in my opinion. Must watch Up again.
They both do this real interesting thing where they fit the dialogue-free-artsy-animation into a mainstream, consumable family film. There’s a part of me that wishes Pixar would produce films that do that for the whole runtime, but in reality the animation industry really benefits from their work. I think Wall-E sticks the landing a lot better, but they’ve both made a real impact culturally. I think that’s true for their minimalist openings and also for the best of their climaxes - Inside Out, Coco, and their latest film Onward all have brilliant moments that I found really touching.
Strange Days on the big screen (still extraordinary), followed by getting home and immediately putting in my DVD of the same in order to listen to Kathryn Bigelow speaking for an hour about how they filmed that opening sequence (it’s one of those things that you realise is amazing when you see it, but which gets progressively more impressive the more you learn about it).
C and I bought the first season of the classic television series Maverick, and we just watched another episode last night. The more episodes of it I see, the more I wonder how much of an influence it was on Firefly . . .
We’ve been having technological complexities in our video watching: Some of the discs we watch played at excessively high volume (so we worried about annoying our neighbors), others at excessively low volume (hard for us to hear)—and hitting the volume up/down buttons on our remote had no effect. We decided that the player had started to fail and bought a new one. When we found that that one had the same problems, I decided to replace the monitor. But in the course of researching new models, I went back and looked at our original purchase order, and found the user manual, which contained instructions for a rather arcane series of button pushes that would raise or lower the volume, which I’ve now used.
However, it’s still annoying not to be able to change the volume with a remote, so I’ve ordered a new monitor from a different manufacturer, after calling them to verify that this would work. I’m going to move the old one to my desk, to give me a larger work surface, which is a real asset for copy editing. I won’t be watching video discs in my office anyway, and I have speakers on my desk, waiting for C to set up the amplifier for them.
We’re going to keep the new video player; it can stream as well as playing discs, which is handy, and it has a much smaller footprint. We’ve tested it by watching Sense8 and Continuum, and it seems satisfactory. We’ll probably hang onto the old one for backup.