Movie & TV Show Recommendations

[Ged!]

I watched the Samurai trilogy over the last week. An old production from the 50s that depict the life of Musashi.
The movies are beautiful, but you need some knowledge of Musashis life in order to make it make sense, since it's basically just scene after scene of some of his famous deeds.
Since the movies are old, the acting is more theater than cinema, which I quite liked.
But the love schmalz will they won't they bullshit drove me up the wall. I hated the way it was written and acted.
Still, watch it, it's is a really nice period piece

That climactic sunset duel at the end of part three is absolutely superb, but goddamn does it take a hell of a while to get there.

---

I recently watched Witness for the Prosecution and thought it was terrific. Courtroom dramas seldom really land for me, but this one absolutely knocked it out of the park. It benefits somewhat by being a bit more of a thriller than dealing with specific intricacies of law. I actually prefer courtroom dramas that do the latter if they do it right, the problem is they so seldom do it right. Dietrich and Laughton are both at the top of their game here. Keep an eye open for Una O'Connor as the maid (her final film role). The only minor complaint I might have is Power's performance is a bit stiff at times, which puts him at a poor contrast to the other stars, and it does drag slightly around the middle.

I rewatched Bang the Drum Slowly recently. Both versions, actually. It's about a baseball catcher dying of Hodgkin lymphoma and his relationship with the rest of the team, in particular the star pitcher who serves as the film's narrator. This isn't really a movie about baseball, so much as it's about two good friends who happen to be baseball players. The 1956 teleplay with Paul Newman is surprisingly good and worth a watch, but the more famous 1973 film adaptation is certainly superior. It's worth a watch just to see a young Robert De Niro, or if you're curious to see Michael Moriarty in a move not directed by Larry Cohen.

 

[Foltest]

I saw "There is something about Mary" after not seeing it for years and man, does it still holds up.

So many classic scenes (Is it the franks or the beans) and lines.
Matt Dillion steal the show as Pat Healy. He is hilarious at playing Pat Healy, one the sleazy character in film history.

If you have never seen it, or not seen it in a long time, check it out.
One of the best comedies from the late 90s.

 

[BiggestKai]

I just watched the first two episodes of prodigal son. So far it's actually pretty good. Should I stay the course on this or does it become stupid?

I've finished it. It's one of those shows that's fairly well produced, has mostly likable characters, very well acted for the most part(sister/mother actors aside), and also extremely, utterly retardedly poorly written.
Don't get me wrong it's super entertaining but you think for even a nanosecond on how Bright manages to magic out every crime, or how 90% of Bright's problems with him getting his ass handed to him by the villain of the week could be solved by people not walking 50 miles away to take a phonecall, go back and find Bright gone, or how Martin's "high places" bullshittery and his insane amount of privileges make zero sense.
Are all the characters entertaining as fuck? Yeah. Is it all retarded, very much yes.

Also on the downside, Season 2 was made around Saint Floyd's death, which sadly means that the obligatory "Black cop gets racially profiled by rayciss cops" subplot needs to drag down the first however many episodes of the already shorter season. It also ends on a fairly nasty cliffhanger based on an utterly retarded plot point.
A lot of plot points just show up and disappear in S2 now that I think about it.

 

[Eadred]

The housemaid, a movie starring Sydney Sweeney's tits, another woman, a potato child and a gay pornstar.
Have you seen Gone Girl?
Have you seen any Blumhouse "horror" movie?
Do you think Shyamalan is a good filmmaker and not a talentless hack who got lucky one and a half times?
Have you ever turned on the TV at night when you were a child and looked at those smut films in hope you see boobs, but all you got were shots of the dudes buttcheeks?
Are you easily startled by strings or a person suddenly appearing in a mirror or the frame?
Do you enjoy 90% of the runtime dangling red herrings in front of you to build up the twist, no character development, awful acting, boring cinematography and a soundtrack made by and for tiktok retards?
Boy you gonna love this movie.
Bonus if you love the "all men are evil rapists" sentiment, there is plenty of it in it.

 

[Quijibo69]

Inside No 9, that's about the only good show if you ever get Britbox for free.

 

[Lip Glossary]

starring Sydney Sweeney's tits

You make a persuasive argument for this movie being terrible but Sydney Sweeney's tits are telling the otherwise.
This is one of those movies where you can lean over to someone in the theater while you're watching the trailer and tell them what the entire fucking movie is going to be.

I've finished it. It's one of those shows that's fairly well produced, has mostly likable characters, very well acted for the most part(sister/mother actors aside), and also extremely, utterly retardedly poorly written.
Don't get me wrong it's super entertaining but you think for even a nanosecond on how Bright manages to magic out every crime, or how 90% of Bright's problems with him getting his ass handed to him by the villain of the week could be solved by people not walking 50 miles away to take a phonecall, go back and find Bright gone, or how Martin's "high places" bullshittery and his insane amount of privileges make zero sense.
Are all the characters entertaining as fuck? Yeah. Is it all retarded, very much yes.

Also on the downside, Season 2 was made around Saint Floyd's death, which sadly means that the obligatory "Black cop gets racially profiled by rayciss cops" subplot needs to drag down the first however many episodes of the already shorter season. It also ends on a fairly nasty cliffhanger based on an utterly retarded plot point.
A lot of plot points just show up and disappear in S2 now that I think about it.

Yeah I'm into season 2 and it's pretty good but I did notice the black cop being profiled by racist cops and just did an eye roll.
It's cheese but it's entertaining and less offensively woke than most shows that were made in that time. My girlfriend calls it "House: the profiler" because it works on the same formula.
Mystery shows up, smartest guy in the room thinks he has it figured out, swerve, smartest guy in the room can't figure it out, epiphany in the last 5 minutes, smartest guy in the room figures it out and explains it to the rest of us peasants. Instead of diseases it's murders.
Also I like the actor that plays his dad but it's funny to me that the woman who plays his mom is obviously only 5 years older than her son.
It was nice to see Lou diamond Phillips get off the Syfy channel for a while.

 

[Tor Lugosi]

I liked the first season of Prodigal Son. The show was like if you took the Hannibal TV series but replaced Will Graham with Shawn Spencer from Psych.

I couldn't stomach season two, though. I don't know what they were thinking shoehorning in politics like that. All the "the white police hate the black detective" scenes were all so horribly fucking done that they killed my interest in the show; they all felt like something belonging to a completely different show.

 

[Weland]

Would you guys recommend "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"?

I despise Joss Whedon with every fiber of my being, but I keep hearing how good it is and I'm curious.

Buffy gets better and better with season 3 being the peak, then season 4 drops off but it's still fun for comedic value (skip the frat army episodes), then it turns into a bleak miseryfest. Season 3 is a must-watch.
But overall Angel was better. The characters felt more adult and there is less emphasis on dysfunctional "who had secks with who" drama and more on friendship/family dynamics. As a bonus there are a lot of surprisingly good Buffy/Angel fics to read afterwards

 

[Hentai-Semitism]

Would you guys recommend "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"?

I despise Joss Whedon with every fiber of my being, but I keep hearing how good it is and I'm curious.

I have zero interest in the show, but you might want to check out the 2002 game for the first Xbox. I hear it's close to the source material and somewhat challenging.

 

[The Blue Morpho]

My Saturday movie this weekend was "The Man Who Would Be King," the 1975 adaptation of the Rudyard Kipling novel of the same name. Starring Michael Caine and Sean Connery, it is about two former British soldiers turned lovable scoundrels who travel to an ignorant and barbaric backwater in northern Afghanistan where they enrapture the natives with their skills at soldiering and become kings and gods. It has that very specific type of British colonial orientalist racism and it taps into the deep, masculine, viking urge to explore new lands, conquer the natives, loot them of their wealth and take several concubines. Also, like many of the greatest films, there is not really a single female character. 9/10, highly recommended.

 

[Lip Glossary]

I liked the first season of Prodigal Son. The show was like if you took the Hannibal TV series but replaced Will Graham with Shawn Spencer from Psych.

I couldn't stomach season two, though. I don't know what they were thinking shoehorning in politics like that. All the "the white police hate the black detective" scenes were all so horribly fucking done that they killed my interest in the show; they all felt like something belonging to a completely different show.

It's funny when the woke really started to mix in to movies and television because it wasn't subtle. What you're saying about it's feeling like a completely different show makes so much sense.
We were watching that movie bullet train last night. Great movie, fun premise, but when he fights that snake poison girl who annoyingly says bitch more than Jesse Pinkman in the 5 minutes of screen time she has, there's actually a line where he stops talking and says "I'm mansplaining, aren't I?" and it's such a surreal, fucking weird line in an otherwise inoffensive action movie.
It's almost like they were going for a laugh and it didn't land, or the line was originally "I sound like my dad right now" or something like that and it got changed at the last second.
I don't let that one two minute scene ruined my enjoyment of a great movie though so I highly recommend it if you haven't seen it.

 

[Mussolini’s Merkin]

It's funny when the woke really started to mix in to movies and television because it wasn't subtle. What you're saying about it's feeling like a completely different show makes so much sense.

Worst case of this I saw was Brooklyn 99, that last season was so godawful. The show had been going downhill for a while but it was a real train wreck of a send off.

 

[BiggestKai]

Worst case of this I saw was Brooklyn 99, that last season was so godawful. The show had been going downhill for a while but it was a real train wreck of a send off.

Floyd's death absolutely ruined any running police show at the time(at least the ones I've watched, no idea if like Blue Bloods had its own take on Floyd or what).

Another example is the remake of SWAT(the one that has Shemar Moore). It's a very slop-ish show but I half liked it mainly because
A) Kenny Johnson(Lem from The Shield plays Lem from The Shield but a cuddly honorable cop instead of a corrupt one)
B) It being poorly masked advertisement for LAPD SWAT meant they had access to all the sick ass toys and gadgets and often dedicated episodes to said gadgets and they looked cool.

Anyways there are two instances I remember dumb fuckery happening thanks to Floyd.

1. Hondo(Shemar Moore, who is written to be someone's self insert because he's the coolest dude cop community man hood legend to ever exist) gets racially profiled while on a trip to somewhere. He's asshurt about it and he does the scene that all of these shows do where they make out the racist cops to actually be really bad at their jobs and cry and whine that all of their years on the force didn't matter and blah blah blah and it's some of the dumbest shit considering Hondo's like a very high ranking dude in the LAPD and could have very easily defused the situation or have done something after the fact with the brass.
2. Hondo's hood friend's son gets caught in a street shooting. Almost 95% of the evidence points to him and his gangster friend to being perpetrators of the shooting(which I think his friend turns out to be responsible for the shooting, and the son did something to cover up for him) , and they get STEVE FUCKING BILLINGS FROM THE SHIELD(as in the same character, not just the same actor, because this is a show written/produced by Shawn Ryan and is implied to be in the same universe-ish but it doesn't come up) to play the role of the bumbling racist detective who dares to see the evidence as it is and is talked down to by Hondo until he decides to take another look and realizes the error of his ways of thinking young black teen who was in a gang and is affiliated with a gang and hung out with a gang member and whose father is a gang member could be involved in a gang shooting.

 

[TheArtilleryman]

Peep Show is one of the funniest Brit comedy shows ever in my opinion. The gimmick is it's almost entirely POV shots with internal monologing like you're in the characters heads seeing through their eyes, hence the name.

The characters aren't likeable but you grow fond of them and they're written really well underneath all the humour. I think Super Hans is iconic because we all knew someone like him.

I'm not finished it yet, all I'll say right now is that is  so Gerard.

 

[Borealis]

In many ways, Dances with Wolves is the original and, perhaps in some ways, "superior" movie.
I especially love this scene from the movie. I reckon it's the moment when John Dunbar begins to truly embrace his wants of belonging.

Yet I can't shake the effect that Avatar (2009) has had on me. People may ridicule it for being a "simple" movie, but I absolutely disagree with this.
James Cameron's avatar from 2009 is an incredible movie. If people find Star Wars to be a cinematic spectacle, then they surely must find Avatar to be one as well.

Jake Sully is John Smith, and Neytiri is Pocahontas. That's alright, and being able to partake in the cinematic spectacle that is Avatar and loving it is alright as well.

 

[God's strongest milkman]

I've been rewatching the original Iron Chef from Japan in the 90's. They're all available on YouTube and they're fucking great.

It's little 90's japs but it's entlish dubbed by like trans continental accent having newscaster types. Extremely comfy and the chairman was the kookiest most dramatic jap ever with weird monkey expressions. The ingredient reveals are great. The stupid wrestling plots are fun without being too obnoxious. even the way the chefs rise out of the ground like God kings to loom over challengers before being picked is fun.

A white man's voice telling a dad joke only to be interrupted by a man yelling "fukui San!!" Every 5 minutes is very funny.

Also as someone very interested in cooking it's really interesting to see what was considered fancy modern cutting edge food in like 1996. there's an episode where the challenger is supposed to be a trained expert in a new cutting edge futuristic cooking technique. Sous vide. And they're all very excited.

A Lot of the challengers are from Japan but occasionally they get some foreign guy that shows up. So there's a nice variety of types of food.

 

[William F. Clinton]

I watched through Profit (1996) recently. Extremely ahead of its time network drama with an American Psycho "literally me" type protagonist. It was a few years before the Sopranos and was cancelled after a few episodes for being too edgy. Probably would've done better on HBO instead of Fox.

 

[BiggestKai]

Been watching Strike Back, action tv series about a british soldier and an american soldier going on the bromance of the ages set against the backdrop of cool firefights and stomping a mudhole in terrorists. In a very vague way it reminds me of Sharpe with how formuliac it is, but the shootouts are quite fun to watch and Stonebridge and Scott play off each other extremely well.

Stonebridge is the no-nonsense brit who's calm and cool and professional and has a jawline I'm VERY jealous of, played by Philip Winchester who I knew the most as Crusoe from that one sadly cancelled 2000s Crusoe show.

Scott on the other hand is an American maverick delta force guy who's the funny guy of the two, constantly cracking jokes, flirting with every woman who moves and poking fun at Stonebridge.

I'm also convinced Sullivian Stapleton(Scott's actor) wrote the episodes because it is a Cinemax production and it is VERY smutty, constantly throwing out uncensored T&A at a moment's notice at least once every episode, usually Scott's getting laid with some random chick in a very random manner(Scott almost getting blown up by a terrorist as a test and the next scene is fucking the lady terrorist of the group who drugged him and put him in that position) and they got some very gorgeous extras here.

It also has quite the powerhouse of guest casts, every season after the first is ten episodes and it seems like every two episodes is an arc somewhere(so two episodes in Sudan and then two in South Africa and so on), but they all share some common big bad Section 20's going after. I'm a bit through season 3 but so far the guest stars included

1. Liam Cunningham from Dog Soldiers
2. Iain Glen, most recently from Silo and a bunch of other stuff including Spooks which is a very good spy thriller too.
3. That huge Nigerian man who played Adebisi in Oz.
4. That guy who played the chief engineer(Also apparently James Potter in the HP movies) in Chernobyl - Adrian Rawlins
5. Charles Dance
6. Rhona Mitra, live action model of the original Lara Croft, as well as a huge number of other projects.

It's a very silly show but a very enjoyable one, and I really do enjoy the firefights in it even though Scott and Stonebridge have a hefty amount of plot armor(they get shot and all but people happen to miss a lot against them even if they do try to do the tacticool approach and have both provide covering fire and some limited amount of tactics against them, could be explained that they're off fighting retarded sudanese/somalese/pakistani terrorists where all the brainpower is concentrated in the series/arc antagonist but still)

 

[Calvin Gabriel]

I thought it might be interesting to suggest some good movies from my homeland the Czech Republic to you guys. I think we've really managed to produce some great kinos in the past, though after the 90s (and definitely after the 00s) it's mostly wannabe western-like slop, but without the talent or the money.

• Postřižiny (Cutting it short) − An artsy socialism era nostalgic comedy set in pre-WW1 Bohemia. It does have a story, which centers around the director of the local brewery, his beautiful wife and annoying yet charming uncle Pepin, but that's not really the reason to watch this piece. It's more of a poetic reminder of a simpler and happier time. Hrušínský, cast as the head brewery inspector, is an undisputed GOAT actor in the country, at least in film. I love this movie.
• Spalovač mrtvol (The Cremator) − Is a weird movie. Some call it a horror, some call it a comedy, I don't really see it as either. Only thing for sure is that socialist Czechoslovakia invented the "literally me" genre some 11 years before Gosling was even born... which is of course why the film was immediately banned and only seen again in 1990. The phenomenal Hrušínský (see above) is cast as a cremator in Prague. Though eccentric, as is fitting for his profession, he's otherwise an upstanding family man. The movie tracks his descent into pathological obsession with the idea of reincarnation and death as a means of liberation from the suffering of life, all against the backdrop of German occupation. Cult classic, though quite heavy.
• Kolja - Won an oscar and a golden globe in 1996 and unlike the two movies above it's not a pretentious art-film lol. A middle-aged bachelor in 1988 Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia is short on money, so he unenthusiastically accepts an offer for a sham marriage to a Russian woman to enable her staying in the country. She then immediately flees to West Germany leaving him to deal with a police investigation and, through concurrence of circumstances, also her 5yo son Kolja. Pleasant, cozy and human story + Svěrák (director, writer and protagonist all in one) is just great.
• Lotrando a Zubejda (Ruffiano and Sweeteeth) - Might just be my favorite fairytale. Directed by Svěrák (see above) and released in 1997 it's wonderfully inteligent, naive and kind. A local bandit Lotrando realizes he was so busy robbing people, he completely neglected his son, who, though already a young adult, never even learned to speak. He decides to afford his son the best education available, on the condition that the teacher monks of a nearby monastery don't turn him into too much of a Christian. They of course do exactly that and hilarity ensues as Lotrando Jr. returns and is made to promise to continue in his dying father's profession. As in any fairytale worth its genre, there is a princess to be saved, love to be found and wisdom to be gained out of it all Unfortunately many of the jokes are hilarious wordplays which will be completely lost on foreigners (or a much younger yours truly), but I'd still recommend it.
• Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále (I Served the King of England) - A historical comedy, with an IMO charming light sense of humor. It follows a naive young waiter who craves money and status. During the film he steadily climbs the social ladder amid changing historic and political circumstances (pre-war years, German occupation, communist takeover), only to realize, that no matter how much money he made, he will never never be accepted among the rich and maybe that's ok. This is one of the good films of the new millenium being released in 2006.

There are great many others, but I wouldn't want to bore you more than I already have. One interesting thing about Czech cinema is that after the Soviet occupation of 1968, the regime sort of lost its ideological rigor and conviction, and though it continued for another 20 years it became more focused on just keeping the people docile and reasonably happy. The result for cinema was, that a lot of movies (and other culture) were truly made with the intention of appealing to as well as culturally uplifting the population often without any ideological requirements. Degenerate western-style slop wasn't allowed to be produced and eventhough it wasn't all perfect, the quality was overall leagues ahead of what we're producing nowadays.

I think it'd be nice if other kiwis outside of the US would suggest a few films from their respective countries.

 

[Pokemon Conquistador]

In many ways, Dances with Wolves is the original and, perhaps in some ways, "superior" movie.
I especially love this scene from the movie. I reckon it's the moment when John Dunbar begins to truly embrace his wants of belonging.

Yet I can't shake the effect that Avatar (2009) has had on me. People may ridicule it for being a "simple" movie, but I absolutely disagree with this.
James Cameron's avatar from 2009 is an incredible movie. If people find Star Wars to be a cinematic spectacle, then they surely must find Avatar to be one as well.

Jake Sully is John Smith, and Neytiri is Pocahontas. That's alright, and being able to partake in the cinematic spectacle that is Avatar and loving it is alright as well.

The only reason why I thought Avatar was alright was that I watched it right after Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, a titanic CG'd piece of shit that featured a giant robot with a pair of wrecking balls for testicles.