For a change, it has been 24 with more movies than TV or games. Yesterday I caught up at last with “The World’s End”, my last Pegg - Frost movie to see. Enjoyed it, although you can tell all three movies they have done with the director of Shaun of the Dead follow very similar plot structures.
And this afternoon-evening, after a rainy day ruined an ice rink trip with my eldest daughter (school holidays here, one needs to improvise quick) we decided to go to the movies and watch Trolls: World Tour. Interesting, entertaining enough, if not achieving the same as the original movie did. Plus I did not take very well that the baddies had to be the Heavy Rock trolls… although I liked the twist they did with pop being the real ones to ruin all the other kinds of music
So a nice change from watching so many series lately.
We watched Eurovision: The Story of Fire Saga the other night. I love Eurovision and like stupid comedy so it was right up my street. The Song Along scene just makes me smile.
Hamilton on Saturday night. I’ve been desperate to see it live. Absolutely loved it. Will definitely get tickets when it comes to Cardiff and am more keen to sell a kidney to get up to the West End during school holidays.
We’ve also signed up for an online comedy festival from Next Up. We get a Zoom set from a comedian at 8pm each night in July. So far we’ve watched Abandoman (awesome), Stu Goldsmith (love his podcast, love his stand up - he’s doing a new virtual talk show format which is ok - Infinite Sofa on Twitch), Mark Watson and last night Jess Fostekew. Really enjoying this. My wife and I are back in work so this is a nice breath of fresh air in the evenings.
We have to decide on things to watch, but I’ve just signed up for the free trial month of Netflix, having dropped Hulu a few days ago. I think at the moment I’m most curious to take a look at Sense8, which sounds like it has an interesting premise; C sounded interested in The Good Place, which we’ve heard much about from friends in San Diego county . . .
Definitely watch the Good Place. It’s awesome
I expect that we will.
What’s made me cautious about it has been that it seems to assume a Christian concept of the afterlife. And there are just a lot of assumptions in that concept that I find hard to accept, even at the “willing suspension of disbelief” level. But I’ve always been prepared to take a look when the opportunity came up—and now it has.
I had been holding off on Netflix on account of budget; we had had both Amazon Prime and Hulu. But I’ve just finished watching the final episode of Runaways, which was the last show I was following on Hulu. And there are several things on Netflix that I was interested in, and also a friend recommended a couple of animated series on Netflix as relevant research for GURPS Furries, whose final draft is due in a couple of months. So this just seemed like the time.
Oh, The Good Place is certainly a fantasy; but its starting point is much more vague fuzzy ideas about “wouldn’t it be nice if” rather than Christianity specifically, and one of the great things about it is the gradual revelation through season 1 of what’s actually going on as distinct from those vague fuzzy ideas.
(I don’t normally care about spoiler warnings but for TGP I am glad I didn’t find out about this stuff in advance.)
So after a couple of aborted starts exploring the world of K-dramas on Netflix and running into a couple of complete stinkers, our “recommended for you” selection then featured a whole host of Korean and Japanese shows, most of which looked just as bad. (I think binge-watching Midnight Diner might also have had an effect.)
One show which repeatedly came up for ridicule any time its title card popped up on the screen was the saccharine-sounding Crash Landing On You: a romantic comedy in which “a paragliding mishap drops a South Korean heiress in North Korea – and into the life of an army officer, who decides he will help her to hide.” It kept popping up, and we kept laughing it off wishing it would go away.
Until one day I felt brave enough after the previous stinkers to try inflicting another K-drama experiment on myself and my partner, only this time I searched the internet for some recommendations. And this romantic comedy kept popping up on several lists.
So we gave it a try, and we have not regretted it in the slightest. It’s warm, genuinely funny, and does that thing that good screwball comedy dramas do where just as you’ve been lulled into a false sense of security by some light jokes and humour, something tense and dramatic rears its head. You have to be prepared to suspend your disbelief quite a lot - there’s a lot of preposterously convenient coincidences all over the place, but it’s turned out to be fantastic television. We’ve been thoroughly enjoying binge watching this over a large slice of humble pie.
Absolutely agree.
I’d say it may look like the jumping off point is Christianity but it is certainly way more than just a re-hashing Christian tropes. Also once again: great characters. I started watching on a whim because I couldn’t imagine watching a candy-colored thing called Good Place–I had no idea what I was getting into.
Yeh, as yashima said, its jumping off point is a more Christian concept, but only really because that’s the dominant popular culture view.
The show’s creature is Jewish and it’s been discussed a lot how this has influenced the overall storyline/message of the show.
As for stuff I’ve been watching:
Last night I finished watching all of New Girl. I started it just as something to put on as it seemed low effort, but I ended up really enjoying it.
I also watched all of Warrior Nun over the course of a few days. I expected it to be the kind of ridiculous nonsense the title suggests (and having seen art from the comic it’s based on) but it was actually really well put together.
I mean, the premise is still ridiculous, but the show takes it seriously and gives really good characters and some great action. Though it suffers from being a Netflix-produced series where they want to keep people subscribed, so it ends on a massive cliffhanger.
We loved New Girl.
To the point where I have tried to find out the rules to True American
Oh, that was enjoyable. My OH loves a silly comedy and Eurovision, and I admit I was impressed by the accents, tbh. Even better was the fact that the Russian guy was the spitting image of a good friend of ours, so we were rolling with laughter just with that.
This morning, taking advantage of my holiday, I caught up with a movie I had on my to-watch list for quite a while: Fury. I do love a good WWII movie, and it didn’t disappoint. It wasn’t what I expected, but I loved the battle scenes, and overall I enjoyed that it surprised me by not doing what I had in mind it would do. I think these days war movies are focusing a lot more on the emotional and psychological side of it, and even though parts of the movie made me very uncomfortable, I sort of “enjoyed” the gritty approach.
Watching that movie, I think these days we have nothing to complain about, global pandemic or not.
Yes, well, it’s a part of popular culture that I find alien. That doesn’t mean I’ll necessarily dislike the show when I watch it, but the premise didn’t speak to me.
Accepting that premise is absolutely not a requirement for enjoying the show.
I gotta say, I bounced off The Good Place hard. The tone just didn’t vibe with me at all. Too silly to take seriously, not witty enough to make me laugh, not intriguing enough for me to want to uncover the mysteries.
Space Force was a disappointment as well. I had more laughs (mainly due to Carell), but it bored my significant other to tears. I feel like they were trying to make a respectable military Micheal Scott, but ended up creating a contradiction. He seems like the voice of reason among a bunch of weirdos in one moment, and then the chief buffoon in the next. Carell is still extremely humourous to watch, though. I may keep up with it on my own.
Slowly rewatching the anime Gintama, which is magnificent. It embodies ‘commit to the bit’ better than any other show I’ve ever watched.
Loved the manga for Gintama, and what I did see of the anime. I was bummed they stopped releasing the manga in English, or if they didn’t, no stores near me seem to carry it. Such a wonderful comedy.
Manga distribution is really inconsistent 
I should read the manga! Especially since the show ended before they resolved the plot…
Someone on the BGG Worst Kickstarters thread linked to this - and it’s really rather good, using the medium of rubbish games about COVID-19 to make some sensible points about game design and sensitivity.
The amount of Kdrama available on Netflix is impressive these days. Years ago they had a bunch but it dried up and I got a subscription for Drama fever which had a great selection available the day after airing, on top of a lot of customizable subtitles, and a grandfathered rate of 35 a year no ads. Got killed about a year or 2 ago.
I noticed Crash Landing on to You but hadn’t gotten to it (between pandemic, and animal crossing personal tv time is down).
I whole heartedly recommend Reply 1988, which was recently added to Netflix, which is the 3rd volume of the Reply series. (Reply 1994, 1997) You can watch them out of order, the only thing is the parents are played by the same actors in each.
Coming of age starting in a specific year, world situation, and a “who is the main character going to end up with?”
1988 is less on the relationship and more community relationships, and sadly Netflix removed all the nostalgia, I mean licensed music, like 80s TV show themes, video game themes, and Richard Marx’s Right Here Waiting for you." Which I can not hear without thinking of Reply 1988.
I’ll tell you what I’m NOT watching… Tenet.
AMIRITEGUYS???