zydonk
Joined Sep 2018
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Reviews21
zydonk's rating
Would never watch Batman, Star Wars or the like. Yet having read many of the reviews here I was drawn to watch it. Yes, full of absurd nonsense: hollow moon, billion year old human civilization, whacked-out spacecraft, whacked-out crew, one over-weight, mother-loving hero, usually family problems, buckets and buckets of earth destruction and space-cgi, and a HAPPY ENDING (actually, the ending is quite sublime).
Guess what? It works. Does exactly what the millions who will love this film want to watch. They'll feel that warm comforting contentment on their way home, at peace for now with the absurd world they actually inhabit.
Easy to be snide here - those who watch what they regard as rubbish so they'll have the idle satisfaction of calling it rubbish - but consider what it's like to be able to command billions of dollars and the best efforts of many many talented people just to give you an evening's entertainment for a few dollars or their equivalent. Mighty power there, yes?
Can I suggest a plot for the next big one? Say some nonentity from the back-end of nowhere gets it into his head to use alchemy to turn lead into gold. Wouldn't that be two hours of fun?
Stars are for everything and everybody: excellent teamwork.
Guess what? It works. Does exactly what the millions who will love this film want to watch. They'll feel that warm comforting contentment on their way home, at peace for now with the absurd world they actually inhabit.
Easy to be snide here - those who watch what they regard as rubbish so they'll have the idle satisfaction of calling it rubbish - but consider what it's like to be able to command billions of dollars and the best efforts of many many talented people just to give you an evening's entertainment for a few dollars or their equivalent. Mighty power there, yes?
Can I suggest a plot for the next big one? Say some nonentity from the back-end of nowhere gets it into his head to use alchemy to turn lead into gold. Wouldn't that be two hours of fun?
Stars are for everything and everybody: excellent teamwork.
Production is impressive, no expense spared. Actors stay in character, though that must have been difficult at times. Not because of subtlety of characterisation or dialogue, but because of the excessive detail. How many times do you find that key confrontations are little more than plot devices, so that you cannot read the drama in terms of the characters but must wait for the plot to run itself out?
This is the basic problem with the series. Is it a standard soap plot, with standard characters, or is it about characters with all the idiosyncrasies that can be expected in such a drama? Yes, the characters have fairly clear characteristics, witty, druggy, sexual, etc, but there is no development of these traits.
Granted, the kind of characterisation you might expect in a good movie is not possible in what is in effect an open-ended series. Likewise with the drama: each season ending must have a gotcha that will bring the viewers back in several months' time.
Why raise these issues? They seem to be little more than nitpicking. Well, put it this way. Succession is so good as a TV-style series that it betrays the limitations of such a medium of expression. Simple: the plot rules. It has to, there is no other way to carry a soap opera, which is what Succession ultimately is.
A very good soap-opera, if you like soap. I don't. Stars are for the obvious hard work involved.
This is the basic problem with the series. Is it a standard soap plot, with standard characters, or is it about characters with all the idiosyncrasies that can be expected in such a drama? Yes, the characters have fairly clear characteristics, witty, druggy, sexual, etc, but there is no development of these traits.
Granted, the kind of characterisation you might expect in a good movie is not possible in what is in effect an open-ended series. Likewise with the drama: each season ending must have a gotcha that will bring the viewers back in several months' time.
Why raise these issues? They seem to be little more than nitpicking. Well, put it this way. Succession is so good as a TV-style series that it betrays the limitations of such a medium of expression. Simple: the plot rules. It has to, there is no other way to carry a soap opera, which is what Succession ultimately is.
A very good soap-opera, if you like soap. I don't. Stars are for the obvious hard work involved.
Might tell you what planet I'm on, but I watched the 2020 series before taking the trouble to watch the 2000 film. The fact that I abandoned the latter half way through speaks for itself. So on to the series.
In the film, nobody listens to the music - it's strictly for the marks. In the series we have the dreary stuff shoved into our ears almost without respite. My solution: kill the sound, turn on subs, play Sleeping Bag tracks - real NY music of the period.
Otherwise, a show of some genius(!). 1. steal Marie de Salle and make her the focus - even silenced that works in spades. 2. Invent Clyde. 3. Have Clyde accompany Cherice to check out the record collection on sale. This is episode 5: in my limited experience, by far one of the best 45 minutes I have watched in many years. The Upper West Side folk are mocked, but the bitter truth here is that they are self-realised people (whatever you might think of them), and serve to show (deliberately?) what a bunch of losers the rest of the cast is.
Otherwise, the local milieu is brilliantly created - perhaps sanitised - but serves well to carry the series over the otherwise tiresome listings and morose agonising. Except for episode 6, which seems to be part of another series that got caught up here. Skip it, if you haven't watched yet - it throws the last episodes off balance.
Stars deducted because of the dreary pop music: would have been (much) more except that the good parts are so good.
In the film, nobody listens to the music - it's strictly for the marks. In the series we have the dreary stuff shoved into our ears almost without respite. My solution: kill the sound, turn on subs, play Sleeping Bag tracks - real NY music of the period.
Otherwise, a show of some genius(!). 1. steal Marie de Salle and make her the focus - even silenced that works in spades. 2. Invent Clyde. 3. Have Clyde accompany Cherice to check out the record collection on sale. This is episode 5: in my limited experience, by far one of the best 45 minutes I have watched in many years. The Upper West Side folk are mocked, but the bitter truth here is that they are self-realised people (whatever you might think of them), and serve to show (deliberately?) what a bunch of losers the rest of the cast is.
Otherwise, the local milieu is brilliantly created - perhaps sanitised - but serves well to carry the series over the otherwise tiresome listings and morose agonising. Except for episode 6, which seems to be part of another series that got caught up here. Skip it, if you haven't watched yet - it throws the last episodes off balance.
Stars deducted because of the dreary pop music: would have been (much) more except that the good parts are so good.