My thoughts while watching episode 1:
- this is visually charming;
- how much did they spend for the cast?;
- mh, actually, visually, I like it less than I thought;
- oh, so it's a super super loyal adaptation of the comicbook? No, wait, someone told me there's a twist;
- jeez, keeping the dialogues exactly as they were in the comicbook is not a great idea. They are meant to be read, they feel really stiff in a visual medium;
- this is incredibly boring;
- oh, so that's the twist. I kike it. OK, you have my curiosity.
My thoughts while watching episode 2:
- this is incredibly boring;
- what? We are still at minute 15? Fuck it, I'm giving up, there's no point, I'm literally falling asleep.
Now, this clearly is a superficial judgment and I'm sure that if I insisted and watched the rest of it I wouldn't hate it but I'm at a point in my life where if I'm watching a TV show, I'm incredibly bored and I think the best case scenario is "I didn't hate it", well, I can invest my time in something else.
I love Raylan Givens so here I immediately felt at home, even though it took a couple of episodes to really get going. It’s not the best Justified season out there by a long shot, but it’s better than season one and five, thanks to good writing, humour, tension, dialogues and actors. Also, Boyd Holbrook is a great villain, with a very Justifiedy sendoff. Sure, he’s no Boyd, Limehouse or Mags and Dickie Bennett, but who is?
Idris Elba on a hijacked plane? I’m in! Also, the plot twist: he is not a superhero, not a secret agent, not a soldier, not a cop, not even a boxer, a martial arts expert, someone who learned how to fight at the school of hard knocks. But he does have a superpower: the art of negotiation. And he will use it to defeat (?) the terrorists. Hijack doesn’t have high TV drama ambitions and it’s not a masterpiece, but it’s got tempo, thrills, fun, all the stuff you want from something like this. It kinda reminded me of 24, not in terms of structure, clearly not because of the main character, but in its general vibe.
The first episode left me quite cold, no laughs and some cringy moralistic bits. I even thought I was maybe tired of Zerocalcare. But then I had so much fun with the rest of the show and I though it was very well structured in terms of ambiguity, morality, difficult choices and stuff. So, it’s good. Also, is it just me or did they have a sensibly bigger budget? I don’t remember hearing this many needle drops in the other show.
This is Going to Hurt is a Buffy spin-off centered on the life of an obstetrician who works in public health. I mean, it's not really a Buffy spin-off but it kinda is: everyboyd always has got a pointy answer to everything, all characters are in a constant battle for who's more sarcastic, the show tackles hard themes in an effortless way, there's a constant silly vibe that makes all the thematic heavyness quite tolerable, characters and actors are all irresistible, when it wants to punch you in the guts it's devastating and the main character's mother is a vampire.
I’m in love with Hugo Blick since The Honourable Woman came out so of course I was super excited about him making a western centered on Emily Blunt. And what a beauty it is. A revisionist western that shoots in all directions, mixing melodrama, adventure, some very silly stuff, tragedy, humor, grandeur, while showing some amazing vistas, incredibles skies and a very strong cast of actors. Emily Blunt, Chaske Spencer e Rafe Spall are astonishing and everybody else is so good too.
I watched the first three episodes back then in 2021 and - maybe because I’m particularly attuned with Barry Jenkins' aesthetics - I immediately loved them but for some reason (maybe I didn’t want to watch something so depressing?) I left it at that. Recently I probably decided I wanted to watch something so depressing and I binged the rest of the series. And, well, wow. I can’t think of many other TV shows so well put together, with such a pure cinematic sense. Sure, there are some, but not many. Plus, the actors are all great, the bizarre narrative structure keeps it fresh until the end and sure, you have to like the frankly pompous narration style of Barry Jenkins but I like it, so…
Fleishman is in Trouble has got everything. The actors are great and perfectly cast, it’s visually ambitious and there’s such rich writing, that tackles midlife crisis, couples in troubles, abuses, nevrosis, bad healthcare, classwar, parenthood, small hypocrisies, trauma, being unable to communicate and everything else you could think of. It’s maybe a bit stretched here and there but when it works it’s amazing and that penultimate episode is out of this world.
Halfway through the third short I literally said "What the fuck am I doing?" and I turned it off.
Better than I feared, I guess.
Under the Banner of Heaven made me feel constantly disturbed for seven consecutive episodes and not because of the gruesome deaths (even though they don't help) but because I reached a point where the religious theme, and especially if religious organizations are the topic, I'm just overly disturbed. Every time it started showing manipulation, officials spewing lies, and the whole lovely approach to women, I was all physically tense, snorting and huffing and puffing, visibly anxious, while spectator number 2 held my hand trying to calm me down. Jesus. That being said, Andrew Garfield is great, the whole cast of actors is really effective, it's beautifully shot (even though there's a palpable step down after the first two David MacKenzie directed episodes), the detective story plot works well and the feeling of fingernails scratching on the chalkboard never goes away.
A moderately interesting and adequately produced courtroom thriller, with good actors and a director that seems to feel the need to make it more interesting through random visual flourishes because otherwise the writing wouldn't be enough. And he may be right. The best parts of it are the clothes and Sienna Miller.
We Own This City is like if a sixth season of The Wire came from the multiverse, with returning actors in different roles and a complete change in style. The Wire was very emotional and personal but told through a docufiction visual style, We Own This City is a very dry and journalistic story told through the cinematic, messy, vital, temporally broke, ioncredibly effective vision of Reinaldo Marcus Green. And then there's a spectacular Jon Bernthal, who roams around the episodes like he's the shark from Jaws, swimming here and there, always ready to bite and chew everything when it matters. It needs a couple of episodes to really get there, but it's a great show, full of interesting ideas and with an amazing final episode.
Probably unpopular opinion: I (moderately) liked Moon Knight. The first three episodes have some nice ideas but are fairly traditional MCU stuff, borderline boring. Episode 4 is when it really starts working and it's a nice Marvel version of the Indiana Jones/The Mummy genre. Episode 5 is my favorite: smart, funny, entertaining and for once quite effecting in how it tries to inject mature themes and drama in a MCU thing. Episode 6 is what you would expect from it, but I enjoyed the new dynamic between the two versions of Moon Knight, the action with the "egyptian superhero" and the whole kaiju/gods aspects. Overall, I liked how it used cuts to (not) show the different personalities, I thought the acting was frankly much better than what the show deserved and I'm all for it embracing the more surreal stuff, with anthropomorphic beastly gods fighting each other. I didn't love the show but I enjoyed and while I don't think it's as good as Loki or as the first few episodes of Wandavision, it's certainly much better than the second half of Wandavision and than Hawkeye and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.
A really solid, impeccably made show, with great acting and a good writing. All the cliches of the "true story" genre are there, but in a good way.
The Walking Dead if The Walking Dead was consistently great in every single episode, didn't last too long and didn't sound incredibly dumb when it tried to do drama. Great acting, writing, directing and such lovely writing, always interesting in how it's constructed and so caring and uplifting in how it takes care of its characters. What an amazing show.
As always with MCU shows/movies, there's great stuff here but it's buried under the usual formula and the need to setup a hundred other things by taking time away from the core of the story. This was sold as the Marvel version of a Shane Black movie but it's basically an anesthetized version of Shane Black.
A (mostly) very good cast for a (mostly) very dull show.
Probably the funniest thing I watched with my daughter. Lovely.
This is really cute. Maybe too much.
This is really cute. Maybe too much.
I really don't like and I don't have much more to say.
This kinda weirdly reminds me of the japanese robot cartoons I used to watch as a kid. It's fun.
Lovely writing, direction and acting, a smart, funny and moving story, relevant themes and the right length. Twenty years ago it would have been a movie, now we get a TV show. It's fine, I guess.
Relevant, funny, moving, incredibly well acted, written and directed, so dense, human, full of thought and deep but also visually inventive and fascinating. Wow.
Impeccably written, staged, acted, directed, amazing performances from everybody, so many great faces, so much raw emotion, so ambitious from a visual storytelling standpoint, so good at mixing up fun, tears, laughs, all range of emotions, so perfectly timed in every beat, what a fucking masterpiece. The final episode destroyed me but the whole show is out of this world. Episode 1 perfectly introduces a huge amount of charachters with just a couple of strokes, you instantly love them, you want to spend so much time with them and then... and then... Jesus.
Amazingly written, directed and acted. Kate Winslet is on a different level but the whole cast is really great. And the best thing about it is that even though the mystery is quite interesting, I didn't really give a fuck about the whoddunit, I just wanted to spend time in that place, with those characters. But still, the mystery works. Amazing.
Interesting themes, good action and production values, some good writing, lots of ambition, mixed up with lots of misses and clunkyness (especially with the whole flag smashers plot). Overall it's a watchable show that tackles deep stuff while still being a traditional superhero action story. Which is what should be expected from an MCU production. It tries to do too much and sometimes it fails, but it's fine. It's never as good as the best moments of Wandavision but it's more cohesive and consistent, plus never as bad as the worst moments of that show.
Great entertainment, impeccably made, with a solid cast and excellent writing. And the final episode is amazing.
So, basically, it's Rocky IV.
Basically it's an MCU movie but stretched on 9 episodes / two months and with the bizarre/quirky/interesting/best part they push on the marketing side positioned at the beginning instead of the second act.
