I've watched most of the Mission Impossible films on Hbo in recent months. The one with motorcycle jump and basically Skynet is kinda sucky, but in general it's solidly entertaining. The first one and 'Rouge Nation' are my favourites.

Thoroughly enjoyed The Gold on PBS. The second—and final—season/series is either airing on the BBC now or just finished, so I assume it won’t reach PBS until next year.

Bernardo wrote: Wed Oct 22, 2025 11:36 pm

jimmy spako wrote: Sun Oct 19, 2025 1:05 pm Watched the first episode of The Chair Company today.
It's great and reviews of the season as a whole are promising.

https://www.vulture.com/article/the-cha ... eview.html


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0lDMHAGDnU

Could not finish ep01, having seen all of his Netflix series and now this much of this, not for me. I was barely on the fence at one point.

I had to watch this old bit twice last night, though:

https://youtu.be/S36cdiNSyIg

I love them. "I got the kids"!

I just had to look it up for fun and curiosity, but Heidecker not actually getting a divorce. However, he's has done a lot of comedy around the idea of divorce, suggesting that he is in fact getting a divorce.

We started watching Monster: The Ed Gein Story. Not my pick, buy my wife's. Below has some spoilers if you care.

Not only is it just completely unsettling as a story, but it's told in a really weird way that can be very hard to follow, and is questionable at best. The continuity is already broken in some ways (the scene where he's walking through a field as it's turning to dusk, then at night he's still walking in the field and its got a few inches of snow on it, is just one minor point). As you watch this story be told about Ed Gein, out of nowhere, Alfred Hitchcock is having dinner with a guy who wrote a book about him. There's no setup for what year it is, how long time has passed, is this the future or the present (you'd only know if you knew when Ed Gein was active and when Hitchcock was alive). Why are these two people talking? The next scene, two guys are having sex. It's Anthony Perkins and his boyfriend. Anthony Perkins is going to his psychologist with the pain of being gay and struggling with the fact that he has to play a sadistic character. Then, we're back to Ed Gein. It just keeps going back and forth between Ed Gein torturing and killing women to Alfred Hitchcock not just filming psycho, but how the film had changed cinema and how it destroyed both Anthony Perkins career by pigeon-holing him as Norman Bates, but also how Alfred Hitchcock ran out of favor as other filmmakers like John Castle were making new kinds of horror, inspired by Psycho. To make things even more confusing, there are scenes of people watching Psycho, but what is being shown on screen is the actor who plays Ed Gein, and not the actor playing Anothony Perkins, with a more revealing and life-like verison of the shower scene, where a naked woman is being stabbed to death, complete with all the blood, tits and gratuitous knife work as Ed Gein/Anthony Perkins/Normal Bates is killing whoever the woman is supposed to be, I somehow got lost. As the story progresses, the backstory of Gein and the tangent with Hitchock get intermingled, where it's not clear if this is a dream, an imagined piece of history, or an actual story being told.

On top of all this, the actor playing Gein came up with a voice that cannot be verified that sounds extremely odd and hard to hear and does not come off as a good idea in general.

It's like AI wrote this with the prompt: tell me a story about Ed Gein, but make sure to show that Alfred Hitchcock was inspired by him to make the movie Psycho.

This could have been an interesting show if it wasn't so much focused on the wrong details and told in a different order and the directory told the actor playing Ed Gein to cut the crap.

Wood Goblin wrote: Mon Jul 21, 2025 2:14 pm
Life on Mars, however, is all that and more. It’s probably a top-ten all-time show for me.

Life on Mars is indeed good. I'm loving the 70s Manchester thing, the way Hunt always comes to a skid the stopping the car. I bet the outtakes are incredible. The music is also very good: Hawkwind shows up three times, fuxache. They must have had so much fun making that. Also, the theme song is so good I've made it my ringtone.

Dead Cemetery Road, by someone involved with Slow Horses, like the latter, on Apple+. It's OK so far. I like Ruth Wilson and Emma Thompson, but there's something pretty "mid" about it, two episodes in.

enframed wrote: Mon Oct 27, 2025 6:47 pm

Wood Goblin wrote: Mon Jul 21, 2025 2:14 pm
Life on Mars, however, is all that and more. It’s probably a top-ten all-time show for me.

Life on Mars is indeed good. I'm loving the 70s Manchester thing, the way Hunt always comes to a skid the stopping the car. I bet the outtakes are incredible. The music is also very good: Hawkwind shows up three times, fuxache. They must have had so much fun making that. Also, the theme song is so good I've made it my ringtone.

There’s a scene when the modern-day cop and the main 70s cop get in a fistfight in a hospital room (IIRC), and right before the punching begins, the modern-day cop makes a little “come at me” motion with one of his hands.

I don’t know why, but fifteen years on, and it still cracks me up to recall that scene.

I haven't been able to finish the first episode of IT: Welcome to Derry yet, but holy shit, that scene in the car was something.

We were watching on Netflix Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial. Man, it's hard to watch, with the parallels that are going on today in America. They talk about the rise of Hitler and the aggressive tactics he and the Nazi party used to gain power. Also interesting is not just explaining how, but also why, and humanizing these historical figures that cracks the crystal around them. They were deeply flawed and angry men, but the anger ran deep culturally. For WWII fanatics, a lot of this is nothing new, but it's a good reminder. The takeaway for me regarding the current political climate in America is that Trump and MAGA, as hard as they might try, are not on a path to victory. The similarities are the economic issues: for them, it was rebounding after WWI and the cost of supporting a wounded Germany, with the Social Democrats holding the bag. They were the perfect patsy to blame for everyone's woes; for us, our economic hardship is too nuanced because both parties are awful. Trump seized on the idea of change, while Democrats seized on the idea of keeping the status quo, a losing proposition that is just as obvious in the rearview mirror as it was when it was on the horizon.

However, the difference is quite stark. The Nazi party was popular enough and had momentum behind them to bring in change. Concentration camps, another world war, that was not on the table until after Hitler consolidated his power and ousted all opposition. Concentration camps weren't even discovered until after Germany surrendered (correct me if I'm wrong, it was that or much later after the war started). For Trump, he's got very weak support and all the momentum he had from January is flailing. He is not addressing the economic problems that Americans are facing and the shutdown is exasperating things for us all, while Trump throws Great Gatsby themed parties and adorns the White House with gold and marble. In fact, looking at things now this feels more like 1920's America, not 1930's Germany, in terms of where we're headed. In America, we have a strong identity with defeating Fascism that isn't going to be erased overnight, no matter how hard it is tried.

The whole background to the documentary was the trial that took place, and the justice received. It was a reminder that good can triumph over evil, and that evil men are human, not gods.

We haven't finished the series yet, but watching it and then moving on to the election results, it was very electric.