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it's clear that Joanna is pretty much identical to Lady Macbeth

Yeah, I liked the "out, damn'd spot!" bit where she's at the sink trying to get her dress clean.
posted to FanFare by whir at 6:21 PM on August 13, 2015

I thought the Bedilia stuff in this episode was fantastic, but the Great Red Dragon sex scene looked like it had leaked out of a portal to the Red Shoe Diaries dimension, and Dolarhyde's demon persona looked a lot like a Dio album cover.
posted to FanFare by whir at 11:49 AM on August 8, 2015

Oh my god, yes, the demonic deer-head laughing scene, it's amazing. I love the dutch angles and the bit with the lamp.
posted to FanFare by whir at 10:00 PM on July 29, 2015

Holy cow. I didn't expect this episode to end like it did. Stellar acting by Rami Malek, as usual.

One moment in this that tickled my black little heart in this episode was how Elliot sort of computes in his head what Angela wants to hear while she's on his stoop, and then says it, and it totally works and she takes it as heartfelt. And then of course at the end he has to deal with the outcome of interacting with the world through that kind of realpolitik/game theory lens.
posted to FanFare by whir at 9:55 PM on July 29, 2015

Oof, yeah, this ending was pretty awful, with a bunch of freshly-minted antagonists suddenly appearing out of nowhere. I had a lot of trouble believing that the abbies could have destroyed the world, given that about 5 people with small arms were able to keep an army of them basically under control. None of the guards' motivations were particularly clear, the bonk on the head was cartoonishly dumb, and also that one kid seemed to survive a gunshot wound for a ridiculously long time after our… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 5:54 AM on July 24, 2015

That was a pretty fantastic dream sequence in this one, and they've also thrown the Tyler Durden scenario into question for me again after seeming to all but confirm it last week. Lots of the fsociety people talk to Christian Slater, even at times when we don't seem to be watching the scene through Elliot's POV, and the show is also spending more time showing things that Elliot just wouldn't be aware of, like the "let's go sell drugs in a nightclub bathroom" friend date between Angela… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 9:25 AM on July 19, 2015

but none of the other characters had dialogue with his character in the arcade

Maybe I'm misremembering, but I'm pretty sure some of the other fsociety members argued with Mr Robot in the arcade in this episode about whether the plan was a good idea, before the fever dream, and they also talk to him in the car.
posted to FanFare by whir at 9:41 PM on July 20, 2015

Ok, I'll bite. I liked this movie (though it's been a few months since I saw it). I thought they did a really good job of conveying a sense of generalized creeping dread, especially with the neighbors, and the body-horror bits were extremely disturbing and squeam-inducing. The ending was effectively bleak, though I sort of saw it coming from a ways off. It wasn't the most original movie ever but I thought it did a good job of inhabiting its little space.
posted to FanFare by whir at 9:10 AM on July 19, 2015

About the bomb, in the last episode they did show them going back behind some big bags of flour or whatever before the bomb went off, so my own credulity wasn't too strained by the kids surviving, personally.
posted to FanFare by whir at 1:25 PM on July 12, 2015

...but having thought about it a little more, I do agree that the driver being dead while they are alive seems inconsistent.
posted to FanFare by whir at 1:26 PM on July 12, 2015

I'm a bit bummed out at how much the show is veering into the Tyler Durden scenario, though I'm still enjoying it. Like, it's pretty obvious now that Christian Slater isn't real, right? None of the characters except for Elliot and the fsociety crew ever interact with him, the bartender doesn't seem as if he seems him, and it seems doubtful that he could just waltz right into AllSafe and start just sort of hanging out by Elliot's desk there.
posted to FanFare by whir at 1:15 PM on July 12, 2015

Another problem with using a CD as an attack vector is that you've just handed somebody a read-only copy of your attack software for him or his buddies at a top-echelon security company to analyze. Still enjoying the show, though.
posted to FanFare by whir at 9:27 PM on July 6, 2015

Well, he might wind up in Times Square if his office is in somewhere in midtown, which would be plausible. I used to work at 40th and 8th Ave, and wound up seeing enough of Times Square for a lifetime.

About the men in black, his psychologist does specifically mention them as things that he's thought of as delusions in the past, so I think the Tyler Durden scenario is still possible, though I hope that isn't the direction they're going in. I do like that the show is… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 12:48 AM on June 27, 2015

Yeah, I really wanted to love this one and thought the acting was pretty good throughout, plus a lot of it was filmed in my neighborhood which is cool. But they just didn't manage to stick the ending.

Stiller's big speech about documentary truthfulness is all undercut by how much we've been shown that his character is sort of aimlessly avoiding finishing his documentary throughout the movie - he never seemed like a guy who was toiling to make great art because of his… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 7:37 PM on April 6, 2015

Yeah, that seemed like kind of a cop-out to me too.
posted to FanFare by whir at 10:58 AM on May 16, 2015

...and it's cancelled. *pours out pint of bitter*
posted to FanFare by whir at 8:35 AM on May 9, 2015

Yeah, that fight scene was amazing, I love how Murdock/DD can barely keep on his feet in between bursts of violence.
posted to FanFare by whir at 9:03 AM on April 11, 2015

Wiki for Night Nurse. Interestingly, she's a crossover from Marvel's brief run of romance comics in the 70's, brought back by fanboy writers in the mid-aughts. She had a limited-edition team-up book with Dr Strange at one point, and if I recall was present in either the Bendis or Brubaker run on Daredevil, though I can't find proof of that at the moment.
posted to FanFare by whir at 10:30 PM on April 12, 2015

Yeah, having watched this and the next episode I'm pretty happy with the show, it's exceeded my (admittedly low) expectations. The guy playing Foggy does a good job and looks the part, and they use him well as comic relief. I'm guessing Charlie Cox is about to go from "that Irish dude from Boardwalk Empire" to "actor Charlie Cox" (or at least "that dude from Daredevil"). I also like that they're taking their time about introducing Kingpin and anyone with superpowers.… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 3:48 PM on April 10, 2015

Maybe I was just grumpy when I watched this, or maybe I'm bummed about Tucci's character being killed, but this episode seemed like it went completely off the rails to me.

Why didn't Young Frankenstein cover up his body with clothing or something to protect himself from the wasps and later, the fire? And really, they couldn't figure out any way to kill a bunch of bugs than blowing up the whole hospital room? And what was the urgency in doing it right… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 9:53 AM on April 10, 2015

I really liked this movie, and thought it was one of Allen's best in years. I thought it was kind of Scandinavian in its merciless treatment of Jasmine.

As a person from San Francisco I did find it to be hilarious how Allen just populated the city with the sort of Italian hot-blooded dudes that mostly only exist in New York and the eastern seaboard, though. He might as well have filmed it in Scranton or Peoria for all the setting had to do with the movie.
posted to FanFare by whir at 7:45 PM on April 6, 2015

Once thing I really liked about this movie was how it well managed the tricky business of turning the protagonist (mom) into the villain, and the antagonist (the kid) into the protagonist, at least for the stretch of time towards the end where she goes off her rocker.
posted to FanFare by whir at 9:18 PM on April 3, 2015

I binged out on this show and think it was pretty amazing. Looking forward to discussing the whole thing in the thread for the final episode, but I don't know if I remember the episode boundaries well enough to drop into the episode threads.
posted to FanFare by whir at 2:38 PM on March 27, 2015

I'm pretty sure the thing Tucci was playing with was the bullet he got from the Russian guy.
posted to FanFare by whir at 2:54 AM on March 15, 2015

I'm with octothorpe, as a PKD purist I think this was near to the best you could hope for from a TV adaptation (for its serious tone and high production values, if nothing else). I think changing The Grasshopper Lies Heavy to a film actually makes sense for an adaptation, since it's a lot easier to represent than just having the characters sit around talking about what they've been reading about. They introduced it pretty early compared to the book, but I guess that's a TV pilot for you. I'm… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 4:58 PM on January 17, 2015

Looks like this got picked up for a full season.
posted to FanFare by whir at 12:50 PM on February 18, 2015

Gah, when is this show going to learn that its character beats are only effective if there's actually some plot happening at the same time?
posted to FanFare by whir at 9:01 PM on February 16, 2015

Well, I liked this a lot more than the faintly embarrassing first part; it's focused on John's exorcism and they dispatch with the less-interesting subplots pretty quickly. The ease by which people are able to sneak in and out of the prison doesn't hold up to scrutiny but it doesn't really sink the episode either, and the John / Manny interactions are more interesting than they've been in the past, with Manny giving a sense that he actually cares about what happens to John.
posted to FanFare by whir at 2:13 PM on January 17, 2015

I enjoyed this; somehow I'd made it out of a childhood steeped in the Big Three authors without ever reading "All You Zombies" and had no idea until the end that it was based on a Heinlein short story. It definitely made all the Space Corps stuff more understandable, because that seemed like just completely out of left field in the movie (which was otherwise fairly "realistic" apart from the time-travel stuff).

I did think there was a bit of a plot… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 11:47 AM on January 17, 2015

I just finished binge-watching this. Anyone have thoughts about whether the kid in Russia at the end actually is Ollie? They made it seem likely with the drawing on the window, but then the kid didn't react, and seemed more like a regular kid than the victim of a human trafficking gang.
posted to FanFare by whir at 8:11 PM on January 5, 2015

Yeah, aside from Parallel Monsters this was by far the worst of the series so far. The frame story was alternately incompetent and incoherent, the skate video had a few promising moments but then turned into what looked like a bad Tony Hawk mod or something, and the magician one was, just, well, magicians don't really terrify me. (The one shot with the rabbit was pretty cool though.) Plus a whole bushel of racist stereotypes about Latinos in that one bit in the frame story!… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 3:00 PM on November 23, 2014

I'm still enjoying this show despite its hokeyness. I liked Papa Midnight's criticism of Constantine's magical techniques, though I kind of wish they'd kept him as an antagonist for a bit longer before they broke out the whole "fight a common enemy with my own former enemy" bit. I did like that an episode I thought was going to be "monster of the week: stop the ghosts" wound up being tied in to the series-wide plot and backstory after all.

I was a bit… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 2:51 PM on November 23, 2014

Was that Glenn's pizza delivery car that they briefly ran past? And the tank from the first or second episode?
posted to FanFare by whir at 10:17 PM on November 16, 2014

I thought this was a good episode. I had been worried that they were going to drag out the revelation the Eugene is not a scientist for the whole season, but they got it out of the way fairly early, and I actually though Abraham's back story was pretty good. They even managed to have some slower moments during the episode which worked pretty well, rather than having everyone just hanging out and bickering.

I liked how once the fire truck broke down the characters were… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 10:03 PM on November 9, 2014

On a more meta level, I also thought that Abe's bull-headed desire to keep moving regardless of how smart it was might have been something of a rebuke towards the widespread audience dissatisfaction with how static everything got when they were stuck on the farm back in season two or whenever. The latest showrunner and crop of writers do seem to be taking the pacing of the show more seriously, and things have been improving a lot this season.
posted to FanFare by whir at 10:08 PM on November 9, 2014

Yeah, first rubbish episode of the season. It's not that the hospital scenario couldn't have been interesting, but they didn't do enough groundwork, like the first scene is all "you owe us" but then they never really explicitly say that Beth is imprisoned there and not allowed to leave, and they make some sort of references to how she needs to pay for food and then leave it vague and don't explain how much it's supposed to cost or what they use for money.

Also… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 10:26 PM on November 2, 2014

Plus, despite the one-armed lady's screaming that "you can't control them" there only seem to be two police officers the whole place, plus a few uniformed extras. And we never get a demonstration of what exactly these cops are useful for to begin with, so much so that the commander is willing to turn a blind eye to them raping the populace of the hospital. Overall I thought the writing was just really bad in this one, completely void of that "show don't tell" idea.
posted to FanFare by whir at 10:30 PM on November 2, 2014

I'd actually recommend not going back to replay that game (which I also liked a lot), as it makes the whole thing seem a lot more game-y.
posted to FanFare by whir at 2:54 PM on November 5, 2014

I might be the only person on the internet who is actually enjoying this show, but it's mostly because my expectations were so terribly low going into it. Like, I don't think it's going to be Hellblazer, but a whole lot of Hellblazer wouldn't work as a TV show regardless - during the Delano era, John spends probably a whole trade paperback just hanging out on the moors with a bunch of anarchist hippies, living out of a van and bitching about Thatcher. As a TV show, I think there's still a lot of… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 12:13 PM on November 5, 2014

Yeah, I've been assuming that the zombies also contain like a quick-acting poison or disease that kills people and is separate from the virus that causes them to rise from the dead, but neither the comics nor the show have ever addressed that issue as far as I can remember.
posted to FanFare by whir at 8:39 PM on October 27, 2014

This was one of those rare instances where I thought the movie was a lot better than the book, though they didn't deviate all that significantly from one another in plot, from what I could remember. Maybe it's just that the whole TV combat angle was more immediate.
posted to FanFare by whir at 11:11 PM on October 4, 2014

Here's an AV Club think piece on the book versus the film, which essentially argues that Amy is more of a villainous monster in the film than she was in the book. (I don't find the argument very convincing, myself, but it's an interesting take and ties into the question of how much misogyny is in the movie.)
posted to FanFare by whir at 1:32 PM on October 6, 2014

2. And whether or not it's true, the whole town still believes that the contents of the diary is true, and still was totally thrilled for them to get back together, which I thought strained credulity a little bit...?

I took this to be part of the film's unsubtle, though well-presented, commentary on how people are more inclined to want to believe in a hollywood love story about redemption and love conquering all than they are interested in knowing… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 8:57 PM on October 22, 2014

I like Scoot McNairy pretty well, he's probably the most interesting actor on Halt and Catch Fire, but his character in this was just overwhelmingly idiotic and I kept wanting him to be killed. Apart from being generally prone to shouting at people in English, he seems like kind of a shitty photojournalist, for one thing not taking a picture of the monster nookie during the last scene. It seems as though Sam would have had an easier time getting back to the US if he hadn't… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 8:05 PM on September 24, 2014

So Tommy just left the baby at the front door, and then his plan was just to tool around town for a while?
posted to FanFare by whir at 3:06 PM on September 8, 2014

Having just finished the book, it struck me that one of the movie's fatal flaws is that the lead actor is kind of a charisma black hole. He's reasonably close to book's unaffected slacker persona, but without getting the funny bits from his narration you lose a great deal of his charm. There's also not really enough characterization of John or Amy, so it's a bit tough to care about them.

The movie is very faithful to the book, despite leaving out vast swaths of story,… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 9:35 PM on July 31, 2014

On my second watch I still didn't like this movie. The whole first half is a tense, successful sort of revenge / ghost movie, it's well-paced and horrifying and has some twists and turns, but as soon as Anna becomes trapped everything slows to a crawl. I didn't really find the whole cult movement to be all that believable in the first place, and I agree with LiteraryHero that hosting the whole thing in the basement of a suburban home didn't seem logistically plausible.… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 10:48 AM on July 17, 2014

The cast do a great job in this, but the ending kind of falls apart for me (though I really like the rest of the movie). The doctor character introduces kind of a rapid tonal shift into comedy that doesn't work very well for me. I especially didn't like the blase way he talks about the spunky assistant producer vet having turned into a zombie, since I was pretty attached to that character by that point.

I still find the post-credits scene to be mostly incomprehensible on… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 2:52 PM on July 9, 2014

Yeah, I'm curious about the book too.

Another thing that struck me this time through was that the long obituary sequence, while affecting, was kind of implausible, since there was no way for the characters to know the specifics of what was happening outside of the studio. It wouldn't have bothered me as sort of an abstract, not-exactly-happening interlude, but then the characters comment on it and make it definitely part of the reality of the movie.
posted to FanFare by whir at 10:54 PM on July 9, 2014

I thought the close-up on the stained glass was Mary wondering whether it was the ghostly figure who had been chasing her, but I suppose there's no evidence for that one way or another.

Oh, also I really loved the shot of her standing in front of the "enjoy salt-water bathing" poster (ironic!). The model in the poster had a strong resemblance to her, too, although knowing what I do about the production it must have just been a coincidence.
posted to FanFare by whir at 8:31 PM on July 8, 2014