What TV Shows Are You Watching? Series VI - Programmes of Power
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Synobun
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You, seasons 1 and 2. Hm, well. I mean... It's... something. I enjoyed watching it. Season 2 went into the absurd a little but was interesting enough to be good. However, its ending kind of unwound all the rest, and it's pretty clear it was just to make a third season (coming out October 12th!). It's a betrayal of the build-up of the past twenty episodes though, so I'm soured.
I am now finally watching Seinfeld. So far, it sucks. But the first season is only five episodes, so I'll give it six or seven.
I am now finally watching Seinfeld. So far, it sucks. But the first season is only five episodes, so I'll give it six or seven.
IIRC it's just been cancelled/not renewed.
Moved to Hulu. Season 3 premieres next year - March I think.
Oh! If it's Hulu I wonder whether it'll be on TV here. It was, a couple of months ago, but just at noon and a few episodes a day so that they could fulfil some contractual obligation to have legally screened it and then never re-aired it.
Though others are claiming the subtitles are rubbish:
Squid Game's "botched" subtitles have changed the show's meaning for English-speaking audiences, a TikTok user says.
Fluent Korean speaker Youngmi Mayer claims the closed-caption subtitles in English are "so bad" that the original meaning is often lost.
In one scene a character tries to convince people to play the game with her, and the closed-caption subtitles read: "I'm not a genius, but I still got it worked out."
But what the character actually says, Youngmi explains, is: "I am very smart, I just never got a chance to study."
That translation puts more emphasis on the wealth disparity in society - which is also a theme in the Oscar-winning 2019 Korean film, Parasite.
Youngmi has since clarified that the English language subtitles are "substantially better" than the closed-caption ones.
But she added: "The misses and the metaphors, and what the writers were are actually trying to say, are still pretty present."
Fluent Korean speaker Youngmi Mayer claims the closed-caption subtitles in English are "so bad" that the original meaning is often lost.
In one scene a character tries to convince people to play the game with her, and the closed-caption subtitles read: "I'm not a genius, but I still got it worked out."
But what the character actually says, Youngmi explains, is: "I am very smart, I just never got a chance to study."
That translation puts more emphasis on the wealth disparity in society - which is also a theme in the Oscar-winning 2019 Korean film, Parasite.
Youngmi has since clarified that the English language subtitles are "substantially better" than the closed-caption ones.
But she added: "The misses and the metaphors, and what the writers were are actually trying to say, are still pretty present."
warpus
In pork I trust
Wait, if I watch that show in English and turn on the subtitles, they will be different from the subtitles if I switch the language to Korean and turn on English subtitles? Huh? Or am I misreading that
I wondered the same thing. Only one way to find out I guess.
I have such high hopes for this. Hopefully, it's not as much of a let-down as the final couple seasons of GoT.
warpus
In pork I trust
Do we trust them to write this properly though? From what I remember reading the quality dropped by quite a bit as soon as they ran out of material written by Martin and had to actually sit down and come up with their own ideas and then turn them into a script. If they couldn't do that, can they do this? Is it based on a novel or are they just making it all up on their own? If it's the latter I'd be worried.
Mind you, I stopped watching GoT in the middle of season 2 or so. I was going to eventually return to it and re-watch the whole thing again, but then season 8 happened and everybody and their grandmother started crapping all over this show. Since then I've lost my appetite for this show, since I know that the series wrap-up was a big fat failure.
Mind you, I stopped watching GoT in the middle of season 2 or so. I was going to eventually return to it and re-watch the whole thing again, but then season 8 happened and everybody and their grandmother started crapping all over this show. Since then I've lost my appetite for this show, since I know that the series wrap-up was a big fat failure.
Zardnaar
Deity
Squid Games on Netflix. It's Korean and so so good.
Synobun
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Fell a little behind on Foundation but just finished the third episode. Pretty great. The time jumping in this show is far less obnoxious than it was in the Witcher.
I finished the first season of Snowpiercer a couple days ago. The premise is... uh... something. They do a good job making you avoid thinking about it, though occasionally they flirt with disaster when characters ask themselves existential questions and attention is brought to the train as an idea.
I guess it's decent. I'll watch the second season, at least, though the finale of the first season was kinda bad.
I finished the first season of Snowpiercer a couple days ago. The premise is... uh... something. They do a good job making you avoid thinking about it, though occasionally they flirt with disaster when characters ask themselves existential questions and attention is brought to the train as an idea.
I guess it's decent. I'll watch the second season, at least, though the finale of the first season was kinda bad.
Synobun
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Episode four of Foundation was a little iffier. It made some leaps that weren't well explained. Still enjoyable.Fell a little behind on Foundation but just finished the third episode. Pretty great. The time jumping in this show is far less obnoxious than it was in the Witcher.
I finished the first season of Snowpiercer a couple days ago. The premise is... uh... something. They do a good job making you avoid thinking about it, though occasionally they flirt with disaster when characters ask themselves existential questions and attention is brought to the train as an idea.
Zardnaar
Deity
I found Snowpiercer to stupid to get into. The basic premise anyway.
warpus
In pork I trust
I have been bingewatching stuff
Narcos - I've seen the "dude standing by empty pool" meme, but now I've seen the show. Great stuff. I have season 3 left to watch now
The Orville - It's like .. more realistic Star Trek with better jokes and more realistic characters and.. more elaborate ethical quandries. I like
Norsemen - It's like Vikings meets the office and monty python. I wish there were more shows like this
I actually can't remember what else I watched that I haven't already mentioned. Those def. stand out though
So let me ask the walnut gallery here. Is the over-acting that we see on this show a Korean thing? Some of the characters on this show were acted rather perfectly. The two girls who survived the longest (IIRC) were really well acted and nothing seemed out of place, even when they got upset or were acting surprised. But say.. the main male character.. 80% of the time the actor playing him is overacting, especially during heightened emotional states. It's distracting. Is it a male vs female thing? Something else? Some of the other male characters were fine.
I also found the same thing with the dubbing. Some of the voice actors were going all in and over-doing the voices. Like, if somebody's surprised, they overdo the "HUH!?!?!?!?" and it just takes you out of the show.
Does that make sense? Is this just what Korean audiences expect? It reminds me of the way western media was shot back in the.. 1920s? Or whenever the movie industry got started or whatever. From what I understand the initial actors were clasically trained for the theatre, and they were overdoing it from time to time, so that the audience could hone in on the emotion that they were supposed to be expressing. Is this happening for a similar reason? If not, any details as to what is happening here?
Narcos - I've seen the "dude standing by empty pool" meme, but now I've seen the show. Great stuff. I have season 3 left to watch now
The Orville - It's like .. more realistic Star Trek with better jokes and more realistic characters and.. more elaborate ethical quandries. I like
Norsemen - It's like Vikings meets the office and monty python. I wish there were more shows like this
I actually can't remember what else I watched that I haven't already mentioned. Those def. stand out though
So let me ask the walnut gallery here. Is the over-acting that we see on this show a Korean thing? Some of the characters on this show were acted rather perfectly. The two girls who survived the longest (IIRC) were really well acted and nothing seemed out of place, even when they got upset or were acting surprised. But say.. the main male character.. 80% of the time the actor playing him is overacting, especially during heightened emotional states. It's distracting. Is it a male vs female thing? Something else? Some of the other male characters were fine.
I also found the same thing with the dubbing. Some of the voice actors were going all in and over-doing the voices. Like, if somebody's surprised, they overdo the "HUH!?!?!?!?" and it just takes you out of the show.
Does that make sense? Is this just what Korean audiences expect? It reminds me of the way western media was shot back in the.. 1920s? Or whenever the movie industry got started or whatever. From what I understand the initial actors were clasically trained for the theatre, and they were overdoing it from time to time, so that the audience could hone in on the emotion that they were supposed to be expressing. Is this happening for a similar reason? If not, any details as to what is happening here?
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Read Frans Bengtsson's Röde Orm, known in English as ‘The Longships’.
I'm up through 4. I agree; it is good.
‘Velvet Underground’: Rough-Edged Rockers
The growth of streaming platforms has brought an enormous surge in documentary filmmaking, with a larger audience than ever before. “The Velvet Underground,” the new film from director Todd Haynes (“Carol,” “Dark Waters”) about the iconic New York band fronted by Lou Reed—which opens Friday at theaters and will also stream on Apple TV+—stands out in this crowded field. It does the things most music documentaries do, detailing the group’s rise and fall with a mix of photographs, film clips, and commentary culled from recent interviews, including conversations with surviving members John Cale and Maureen Tucker. But it does so much more. “The Velvet Underground” is a beautifully poetic meditation on the emotional and cultural power of rock and the allure of making a life in art.
The growth of streaming platforms has brought an enormous surge in documentary filmmaking, with a larger audience than ever before. “The Velvet Underground,” the new film from director Todd Haynes (“Carol,” “Dark Waters”) about the iconic New York band fronted by Lou Reed—which opens Friday at theaters and will also stream on Apple TV+—stands out in this crowded field. It does the things most music documentaries do, detailing the group’s rise and fall with a mix of photographs, film clips, and commentary culled from recent interviews, including conversations with surviving members John Cale and Maureen Tucker. But it does so much more. “The Velvet Underground” is a beautifully poetic meditation on the emotional and cultural power of rock and the allure of making a life in art.
Even before he began work on this project, Mr. Haynes was a noted chronicler of rock and pop. In 1987, he made the cult classic “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story,” a short that used Barbie dolls instead of actors. His 1998 movie “Velvet Goldmine” fictionalized aspects of David Bowie’s rise and was set in the glam-rock milieu of the early 1970s, and his 2007 film “I’m Not There” found multiple actors, including Cate Blanchett and Christian Bale, portraying scenes based on Bob Dylan’s life.
Compared with those knotty semi-fictional stories, “The Velvet Underground” is straightforward in perspective and construction. It starts at the beginning, with details from the childhoods of Reed, growing up on New York’s Long Island, and Mr. Cale, in Wales, and ends when the original incarnation of the band does—in late 1970, when Reed walked away just as it was about to release its final album with him at the helm, “Loaded.” But Mr. Haynes puts his own stamp on the material, using the film to tell the story of the frenetic and groundbreaking world of the New York avant-garde in the 1960s, especially in the worlds of experimental film and music.
The usual story of the Velvet Underground is told in terms of its place in music and its ultimate rejection by the record industry. During the age of flower power and ascendant hippie culture, VU’s members wore black and sang songs about hard drugs and seedy sexual encounters. Though the Velvet Underground was championed by Andy Warhol during the height of his influence, its record label ignored the group and its audience remained small. Mr. Haynes touches on all of this history but spends much more time celebrating the band’s greatness.
We’re almost halfway through the film before the group has started recordings its first album, 1967’s “The Velvet Underground & Nico,” cut with the titular German singer who had become a regular at Warhol’s hangout, The Factory. Mr. Haynes takes his time establishing the parameters of the post-World War II downtown art world, emphasizing the avant-garde film created by those in and out of Warhol’s orbit and using split-screen to convey the era.
Often, one of Warhol’s “screen tests”—three-minute films featuring a near-motionless subject staring at the camera—is juxtaposed with an audio-only archival interview with the subject, while another part of the screen might have quick-cut snapshots from street life in SoHo or the Lower East Side or clips from abstract animations. The collage approach allows the director to pack more information and context into the film’s two-hour runtime than would otherwise be available, and also carries the excitement of sensory overload experienced when one is young and immersed in a new and exciting kind of creativity. Filmmaker and critic Jonas Mekas championed many of the artists whose work appears here, and he speaks in some of his final interviews before his death in 2019.
Mr. Haynes worked with one severe limitation imposed by history and another he imposed on himself. There is very little live footage of the Velvet Underground, and what exists has poor sound. So he had to reconstruct what the band might have been like on stage through the editing of existing material—much of it shot by Warhol—along with still photos and recordings of concerts with varying degrees of fidelity. And he chose to conduct filmed interviews only with people who were actually there. Stories are framed in terms of what they meant in the moment. This makes the narrative seem as if it’s unfolding in the present tense. Singer-songwriter Jonathan Richman, who would later front the Modern Lovers before embarking on a career as a solo artist, offers an earnest and endearing account of seeing VU in Boston when he was a teenager. He claims to have attended “60 or 70” shows and says that the band completely changed his life. The thrill of the period is clearly still alive inside him.
As with any documentary about a subject this big, what’s left out is as important as what Mr. Haynes includes. For the director, the band’s prime years came with its first two albums, after which Reed fired Warhol as the group’s producer and ousted Mr. Cale. Comparatively little time is spent on the 1969 LP “The Velvet Underground” and 1970’s “Loaded,” both made with Mr. Cale’s replacement, Doug Yule, who appears in voiceover but not in an on-camera interview.
The most profound absence from the film regards Reed, who died in 2013. While his voice is heard throughout via archival interviews, his comments tend to be terse and clipped. Reed was known as a prickly profile subject, and he wasn’t prone to reflecting on the Velvet Underground at length.
Which makes Reed’s appearance at the end of the film even more striking. We see him speak on camera for the first time in a brief clip from the 1970s, talking casually to Warhol about catching up with his former bandmates. And then “The Velvet Underground” concludes with an acoustic version of VU’s “Heroin” recorded in 1972, during a concert for French television with Reed, Mr. Cale and Nico. We’re finally seeing Velvet Underground songs performed by their creators in high-quality, and then the credits roll. The immediacy of the group’s brief life gives way to the towering legacy it left behind, to which Mr. Haynes’s documentary now counts as a substantial contribution. Mr. Richardson is the Journal’s rock and pop music critic.
Todd Haynes’s film about the New York band with a small audience and large impact.
Lou Reed, right, performs with the band
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Snerk
Smeghead
George is getting angry!
I love Seinfeld but it's hard to say how much I'd love it if I saw it for the first time today.
GRRM has a big book out on the history of House Targaryen (Fire and Blood), so luckily there plenty of canon to base the new show on. I'm cautiously optimistic.
Synobun
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I gave it as many episodes as promised. There were good jokes in it, but as a coherent narrative it was miserable. It's structured like a series of skits where things are only loosely organized in chronological order, and a lot of the skits feel more like rehearsals than performances where the act gets repeated or drawn out overly long because they're trying to find the one that "clicks."
It was a pretty easy bin for me.
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