@cutecruel it's fascinating to read a review from a person that forced themselves to finish tv show that didn't change it passing or style even once during pretty much the whole thing... That's one hell of dedication, I guess.
Kinda agree with alot of critique here, but at the same time I enjoyed 90% of the show regardless it's flaws lackluster season 1 ending included.
I just couldn't walk past this part:
For the people (especially the Brits) complaining about the accents and asking for English actors. Where were you when you LOoOOvED Chernobyl? A show without even one Ukrainian actor? You guys are such big, fat, dumb hypocrites.
Since when Chernobyl had British or American actors speaking with horrible Russian or Ukrainian accents in it?! How the hell is this hypocrisy than? Come on now.
The creators of HBO drama Chernobyl have explained why some of the characters don’t have Russian accents
The decision to ban the imitation of the Pripyat and wider Ukranian dialects was actually made very ‘early on,’ show’s creator Craig Mazin says, in order to focus on telling the story. Mazin was concerned about the accents taking on a ‘comic’ nature so he let some the actors be Scottish or Irish because their character was good enough. He explains: ‘At first, we thought that maybe we would have people do these sort of vaguely Eastern European accents – not really strong but noticeable.
‘Honestly, I think after maybe one or two auditions we said, “OK, new rule. We’re not doing that anymore.”‘ He added: ‘We didn’t want to fall into the “Boris and Natasha” cliched accent [from The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show] because the Russian accent can turn comic very easily.’
'Comrade' usage on the other hand was fucking unbearable. I don't know how they managed to fucked it all up this badly
@gloom8 First of all, you act as if I had finish watching all 5 seasons of The Wire and didn't like them, not one season with total runtime of 8 hours. I guess you have never ever finished watching something because you had hoped it would get better.
Second, you clearly missed the point. I didn't know the official language of Ukraine is .... English. :face_vomiting: That's brand new information for me. I couldn't care less that the creators of Chernobyl were so "generous" that they didn't want vaguely "eastern European accents" that would have been just fake "Russian English" accent because Americans/Brits suck so much at languages. The show was supposed to be in ... Ukrainian. It's not rocket science, I think? :thinking: Brits wanting British actors to hear the proper accents but not asking for Ukrainian actors to hear the language spoken in Ukraine. Why? We are not talking about just accents here, but entirely different language. They complain about accents but not a language? That's what make them hypocrites. I hope you get it this time. :face_with_raised_eyebrow:
@cutecruel I just drop the show or just listen to it while working / doing chores not expecting it to turn good. But to each their own I guess.
The show was supposed to be in ... Ukrainian.
Not really. They never even considered that as an option.
Should it have been in Ukrainian, Russian and Belarusian? Yeah! Would have been great for us, but not for the main audience I think. Would have been shame to lose actor like Harris through... the rest of the cast could have been played by anyone, honestly
They complain about accents but not a language? That's what make them hypocrites.
Kinda my point here. It's a different issue. It would take no effort to get English actors none of them was famous or anything, right? with proper accents instead and it wouldn't have cost them losing a chunk of their audience. Unlike with Chernobyl. Where many casual viewers wouldn't even bother to watch past episode 2 because of the subs.
Look, I personally switched to Russian dub after episode 2 and finished the rest of Chernobyl not hearing original voices. Cause of all those "comrades" and addressing someone by the full name... with patronymics... during reactor meltdown felt kinda ridiculous to me.
Again, would have been great to watch some familiar faces and hear native languages actually would have been amazing to read subs for the real people that spoken in Ukrainian or Belarusian and vice versa for Russian-speaking participants during those events. But I feel like that's our own problem. Our countries had fuckton of time to produce something decent on the subject for the audience that would get a whole lot more out of the story.
idk sounds like if French audience complained that TV show about Napoleon, made in UK and US for their respected audiences, had no french actors and / or none of the actors even spoke French!
"And why would they?" may I ask.
@cutecruel Honestly, I agree with you. This season sucked. Even as background noise it was boring. Cannot fathom how so many people are giving it 8, 9, 10 ratings. Guess they like endless, slow and dull.
@gloom8 The whole comment is hilarious. The mental gymnastic involved in all that. It's bonkers. The ignorance actually astounds me. It's not my fault that Americans/Brits are too stupid to read subtitles. And yes, French people, Germans etc. all of them are complaining when a movie/show based in their country is in English, and always ask for actors from their country. You're just too busy speaking one language to hear them. It’s like Americans/Brits are proud of only knowing one language and being too lazy to read subtitles, y’all look so dumb and illiterate.
Now be gone, you brain-dead imperialist. I've spent too much time on you. Jeez. I swear, monolingual warmongering colonizers get on my last nerve. When are people gonna get it through their thick skull, that English is not the only language that exists? BREAKING NEWS! The mind boggling ignorance of Americans/Brits about the rest of the world never ceases to amaze. It’s exhausting.
@cutecruel ahaha you're hilarious)))
Sweetie, I think you should read comments before replying to them first:
"I personally switched to RUSSIAN dub after episode 2 and finished the rest of Chernobyl not hearing original voices."
"You're just too busy speaking one language to hear them <...> y’all look so dumb and illiterate".
I guess this person somehow thinks that I'm only speaking English. That I'm native speaker... somehow! despite my horrible grammar Thanks for the compliment, I guess!
"brain-dead imperialist" <...> "monolingual warmongering colonizers"
I mean... at first I thought it was a dig at my authoritarian country how dare you!1... only we can make fun of our wonderful leader mr putin!11. But on the second thought it could be US or maybe even UK just as likely.
Well anyway goodluck complaining in your bilingual country. I'm sure next time British or American production gets they hands on Chernobyl's story they would include Ukrainian, Russian and Belorussian actors to play respected characters. And there would be fuckton of Russian and Ukrainian language on display maybe even some Belorussian! Cause of the historical accuracy of course.
p.s. Something tells me that you wouldn't enjoy this more cultural-appropriate take for having too many languages this time around ;)
@cutecruel I wholeheartedly agree with most of this.
However I think the dead fiance and the uncle evil ghost being ultimately useless is on purpose.
That is an interesting idea in this show (that actually worked very well in Hill House and I agree seemed badly patched on the story here) that there is not the classic opposition of the horror genre "there are ghosts" vs "this is all an hallucination". Here there ARE ghosts, but there ARE hallucinations too. Dani's ghost is all in her head. We never see him do anything. She justs sees him, that's it. Just trauma induced. Henry's one is probably alcohol induced but is also only in his head.
Review by cutecruelBlockedParentSpoilers2020-10-17T18:54:34Z— updated 2020-10-21T13:57:14Z
Here’s an unpopular opinion for y'all.
Very excited to finish The Haunting of Bly Manor, because watching it has been a boring experience. There's a difference between a slow burn and watching an unlit candle. I honestly couldn't get into this one. I mainly continued watching it hoping it would get better. I should have known that it wasn't going to be as good as The Haunting of Hill House from the first episode and how it didn't seem to intrigue me at all.
Plot was terrible, so many plot threads unfinished. They changed the main bad guy 3 times:
First - the fiance. He disappeared after showing himself at the end of the episode and never talked about again, no further explanation;
then - Quint and Rebecca. They dropped them as if they were any other random ghosts. If you spend so much time building up characters at least give them a meaningful ending;
then finally - lady in the lake. Speaking of which, the black and white episode was annoying as hell. The entire episode was a narrator telling you everything, felt like an info-dump episode, and that goes against the “show don't tell” mantra. You can fast forward through about 90% of it and still get the whole story. I found myself repeating “get on with it already!”. I didn't get that “shay wood slipe, shay wood wawck”? until they repeated for the 50th time! It stopped being poetic quickly and just started getting old for me. And I was hoping for something a bit more substantive than a 1700s ghost story. So predictable. I believe this was an attempt to create a second outing of a story similar to the bend-neck-lady, and I think it could have worked if I had already known more about Viola. To have an entire story about two characters the viewer have never met on the penultimate episode of the show just feels out of place.
Other major problems with this season:
The first half was episodes that were just backstory on each character and droned on and on. The characters kept making predictable and dumb decisions that are typical of cheesy Hollywood films - “Why don't I go in the closet alone at night....oh, look at that, the kids locked me in! Wow, how surprising.”; :rolling_eyes:
The uncle haunting himself was pointless. I was expecting something more sinister about how the parents died, instead we got no explanation about what happened;
How the hell had no one in the family ever heard of Viola or the other ghosts before? The Wingraves are just so lucky to have never been up at the same time that Viola was visiting;
Why the lady in the lake didn’t immediately kill Dani when she grabbed her neck? Peter got killed in two seconds, meanwhile Dani’s being shown a house tour;
There are no rules around who is able to see ghosts and who isn’t. I also couldn't understand how Flora seemed to know so much about the ghosts. She even says the other ghosts told her to stay away from the lady in the lake but how did they tell her? The ghosts have no faces and can't speak;
How didn't adult Flora connect the dots? Sure, Owen said the kids don’t remember much but even still Flora knows that her rich parents died in a tragic accident, her uncle took care of them, and they moved from England to America when they were kids. This is incredibly specific, how doesn't that ring any bells?;
There is so much useless dialogue that just goes absolutely nowhere. I felt a strong urge to stab my ears watching that first interview scene with Hannah and Owen over and over again. Every character was given a 10 minute monologue about their complicated feelings. Jamie’s plant monologue stood out to me as the most unnecessary one;
Speaking of which, there is so much exposition and explaining. So much repetition. The flashbacks while the characters are trying to figure out if they’re dead are an absolute bore to watch. There wasn't enough content for 9 episodes, could’ve easily been reduced to 5 episodes and still kept the emotional impact. And SO many scenes dragged on forever. There were a lot of points where I was just thinking, "get to the obvious point and move on". I get that the Scottish guy is going to take Becky into the lake, he doesn't need to keep alluding to it for 10 minutes. Same with them about to take the kids, while Dany was whining in the background. Why she was even there … so that she can hear the magical phrase, “it’s me. it’s you. it’s us.”. How convenient;
I don't like any of the characters. Dani annoyed me to new extremes, her character was just so dramatic. How many shots of Dani’s mouth kinda open do we need? I swear this was her only face expression during the whole season;
The ending felt so forced, rashly thrown together, with the unnecessary and convoluted time shifts leading to the most obvious, overly sentimental and corny reveal, with some more terrible dialogue, written to tug at the heartstrings of people. Flora’s quote at the end about how, “you called it a ghost story, but it’s a love story” just seems like a huge cop out. And people agreeing are just regurgitating the horrible ending. It was not just a love story until the end. If it wasn’t for the LGBT representation, people would have been more honest and called it what it is. :nail_care:
For the people (especially the Brits) complaining about the accents and asking for English actors. Where were you when you LOoOOvED Chernobyl? A show without even one Ukrainian actor? You guys are such big, fat, dumb hypocrites. :face_vomiting:
Overall, Bly Manor is aimless, dragged out, and sloppy. Not even close to being as good as its predecessor.