The Gaming Den

Her Story Season 1

Tells the story of two transgender women living in Los Angeles and their struggles in dating and in their professional lives.

It's only 6 episodes, each around 8 minutes, but the writing and acting is very good. I learn a good bit about trans issues from the show.

I've been binging Money Heist on Netflix. It's a Spanish series about a group "robbing" the Spanish mint (actually they break in and hijack the printers to make 2.4 billion unmarked euros) in the first two seasons and then break into the Spanish National Bank in seasons 3 and 4 to steal the gold, and state secrets kept within.

It's really good, even if they should know by the second heist to have duct tape and a contingency plan for problem hostages...

Prak wrote:I've been binging Money Heist on Netflix. It's a Spanish series about a group "robbing" the Spanish mint (actually they break in and hijack the printers to make 2.4 billion unmarked euros) in the first two seasons and then break into the Spanish National Bank in seasons 3 and 4 to steal the gold, and state secrets kept within.

It's really good, even if they should know by the second heist to have duct tape and a contingency plan for problem hostages...

I'll have to watch that next time I subscribe to Netflix. It might be a while; the delay in the live action Cowboy Bebop (due to the lead getting injured on-set) should be ending around now, but I'm guessing they'll wait until after the plague ends.

Run The Jewels RTJ4 is the most relevant album of 2020. And the best political hip hop since (at least) Public Enemy

Here's the antifascist track about police murdering innocent black civilians as part of the school to prison pipeline:
https://youtu.be/GG8LcqR1kqw

New Chapelle... concert I guess, is really good, he's got a great way of structuring and adding the twist that connects things mentioned early on

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tR6mKcBbT4

Something good came from all this:
https://twitter.com/kilundeezy/status/1 ... 56869?s=20

The singing lady got reunited with her estraged family from this too

OgreBattle wrote:The singing lady got reunited with her estraged family from this too

That's awesome! Glad to hear things can get better sometimes

The Siege, 1998. Not a particularly amazing movie, but oh so prescient and relevant to this timeline. And it has Aasif Mandvi.

Watched the Netflix: Eurovision: the Story of Fire Saga spoof. Overall merely okay, but every one of the spoof musical numbers was howling laughter hilarious - if you are even passingly familiar with Eurovision you'll want to watch.

Got round to watching John Wick...quite some years late, but whatever.

I'm sure someone here said something about how you could give him fangs and make a V:TM (or at least V:TM:B) style movie out of it, and, yeah, did have a V:TM or V:TM:B vibe to it.

Russian sounding accents and business suits seem a part of that

I imagine that the whole "sea full of dead bodies and more betrayal than the Roman senate" help, too.

He's also nicely dressed in black the whole time, described (albeit metaphorically) in supernatural terms and kills zillions of ordinary human mooks and is only threatened by other members of the elite club with their traditions, special gold coins and a doorman called Charon who asks what life is on the other side.

Aaaaaand I've now seen the sequel, and the various clans and their high council doesn't sound exactly like the Camarilla, not something exclusive to the Camarilla, but it doesn't sound very far away from it either.

...

I'm pretty sure he's not going to go all Werewolf with his dog though.

I just rewatched The 13th Warrior with my 13-year-old daughter. I've always liked the movie and I think it is seriously underrated. It only has a 33% on Rotten Tomatoes.

It appears that the critics lambast it as nothing more than a blood-thirsty action movie.

I think I understand where they're coming from, but I disagree. I do agree that individual characters are not terribly well-developed (like the Dwarves in The Hobbit) and that usually happens when you try to have a large group. I think it's worth setting that aside and treating it as a quasi-historical thriller - in that case, the failure to truly understand the Norse characters is the direct result of the narrator being an outsider.

I really enjoyed the aspects of language as depicted in the film - when Ibn meets the Norsemen, he doesn't speak their language. His adviser speaks Greek and then Latin - one of the Norsemen also responds in Latin. As they're doing the translation for the audience, it gives you a good sense of the feeling of exclusion and alienation. This is followed by a travel montage where Ibn comes to understand the language; it starts with all dialogue in Norse and then slowly transitions to partial English.

I got a kick out of it.

I've seen a lot of mockery of the 'learning Norse' scene as obviously fatuous, but my Mother has learned like six languages by immersion and she says it's incredibly accurate to her experience.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:I've seen a lot of mockery of the 'learning Norse' scene as obviously fatuous, but my Mother has learned like six languages by immersion and she says it's incredibly accurate to her experience.

Who mocks that scene? It's like the gold-standard for a movie where characters speak a language other than English but the movie wants to have characters speak in English. The learning and transition montage couldn't have been more perfect: it's organic and believable and interesting and not overly long - it advances the story as well as mechanically allows the movie to shift into English.

Also Hunt For Red October is always mentioned with this topic - it has a good transition but it's a hard-cut instead of organically transitioning.

It's an amazing movie and it's bad Rotten Tomatoes score is one of the things that made me realize RT measures how approachable a movie is not how good it is. 13th Warrior is a great and surprisingly historically rich film.

The only ratings I care about on Rotten Tomatoes are the audience ratings, not critics. I find those are more in line with mine a lot more often. 65% for 13th Warrior seems about right. I don't remember why I didn't like that movie, but despite my penchant for rewatching things the last time I saw it was in theatre.

Went back and rewatched John Carpenter's 1982 The Thing since we are currently living through an age of paranoia where we can't tell who is infected.

Was really struck by how none of the characters have any backstory. They have a name and a job. A couple of them get quick establishing scenes to illustrate a personality trait, and that's it. No flashbacks. No dialogue about what drove them to work at this remote station, no wishful talk about what they can't wait to do when they leave the research station. Nada.

Instead all of the emotional conflicts in the film are generated from curiosity, stress, paranoia, and attempts to survive in the face of the film's alien threat. It works really well, and I cannot imagine anyone trying to pitch a script like that today.

Josh_Kablack wrote:Went back and rewatched John Carpenter's 1982 The Thing since we are currently living through an age of paranoia where we can't tell who is infected.

Was really struck by how none of the characters have any backstory. They have a name and a job. A couple of them get quick establishing scenes to illustrate a personality trait, and that's it. No flashbacks. No dialogue about what drove them to work at this remote station, no wishful talk about what they can't wait to do when they leave the research station. Nada.

Instead all of the emotional conflicts in the film are generated from curiosity, stress, paranoia, and attempts to survive in the face of the film's alien threat. It works really well, and I cannot imagine anyone trying to pitch a script like that today.

So what year did things change?

OgreBattle wrote:So what year did things change?

I'm not enough of a film buff to have an informed answer. But my gut wants to point to Die Hard as part of the shift.

After finding out it got picked up by A24, I tried the Hazbin Hotel pilot and it was really good, really looking forward to whatever the first season brings.

saithorthepyro wrote:After finding out it got picked up by A24, I tried the Hazbin Hotel pilot and it was really good, really looking forward to whatever the first season brings.

I really glad that it got picked up.
Have you seen the Helluva Boss pilot? Also nice Alastor icon.

Leress wrote:

saithorthepyro wrote:After finding out it got picked up by A24, I tried the Hazbin Hotel pilot and it was really good, really looking forward to whatever the first season brings.

I really glad that it got picked up.
Have you seen the Helluva Boss pilot? Also nice Alastor icon.

Thanks! I have seen the Helluva Boss pilot, and I’m hoping it gets picked up as well, maybe if Hazbin gets enough of a good reception.