Altough I'm german I rarely check out german TV shows. The last one was Deutschland 83 and that was like two years ago. Germany just hasn't figured TV out yet but that's another discussion.
When I heard Netflix was producing a german show I just had to check it out because Netflix has a great track record so far and Germany does have talent infront and behind the camera. But overall I think this show just fell flat. Good, but nothing great.
Fantastic visuals that are shot very beatifull, the actors IMO are mostly great and the music/score can be beautiful but often gets obnoxious. But unfortunetly there are too many characters that are hard to keep track off which distracts from the story.
The story is already confusing enough even without trying to keep up with the many characters over different decades and it heavily sets up future seasons without answering a lot of questions about this one and just left me unsatisfied at the end.
Still worth watching tough IMO and very bingeable similarly to Stranger Things.
But if you do watch it then choose the subbed version. I checked out the dub really quick and it sounded horrible. And also don't browse your phone as you might do on other shows. You're going to miss so much important shit.
EDIT after Season 2:
I'm not actually sure what just happened and what I think about it. But the one thing I'm sure of is that the casting in this show is absolutely phenomenal. The actors look so much like their younger counterparts that I'm not fully convinced they aren't actually related.
Plus the cinematography is still fantastic and the music monatages are really beautiful (and they got rid of those obnoxious sound effects).
And altough the story is still very confusing I found it more easier to follow and more engaging than Season 1 because I now know all the charcters and their background. And it seems that the writers had this all planned out and aren't just making shit up as they go.
Changed my rating from 8 to 9.
EDIT after my first rewatch just before S3 is released.
Changing my rating again. This time to a 10. After S1 I thought it was good but confusing show (8), after S2 I thought it was great and really well thought out one (9). Now after rewatching both seasons for the first time I think the show is fucking masterpiece. (10). Once you can watch it without being confused and actually knowing what is happening your just in awe throughout all of it.
If they stick the landing with season 3 it could be up there with the best ever.
EDIT after Season 3
Masterpiece. Simple as that.
Writing. Directing. Cinematography. Casting. Acting. Soundtrack. Everything is perfect.
I'm going to miss the beautiful music montages at the end.
[9.5/10] The most ingenious choice that Greta Gerwig’s Little Women makes is to chop up the story so as to juxtapose present and past. It not only immediately marks this adaptation as distinct from its predecessors, but helps to recontextualize and connect different parts of the story to make it feel new again.
The audience has a chance to meet and appreciate Freidrich before Laurie has burrowed into their hearts. By the same token, the joy and connection between Amy and Laurie can be front and center from the get-go, without springing it on the viewer halfway through the story. And the bookend approach allows Gerwig to put Jo’s drive and travails as a writer into the spotlight early.
But the biggest advantage it confers on the film is how it allows Little Women to constantly contrast the lives that these young girls imagined they would lead one day, with the lives each finds themselves inhabiting in the future. Like the novel it’s based on, Gerwig’s adaptation is anchored squarely around considering the wildest dreams of its titular set of sisters, and measuring them against the paths actually available to women in their time, and the places their choices and passions take them. The jumps back and forth and time allow Gerwig to check expectation with reality, to trace cause and effect, and to resolve the two with poignance and grace.
It also allows Gerwig and company to flesh out each of the young women at the center of the narrative. Jo March still commands the story and the screen. Saoirse Ronan throws herself into the role, conveying all the punch, heedlessness, and subtle vulnerabilities of the character with endearing abandon. It is both a dream role and a hard one, but Ronan makes it look effortless.
And yet, this adaptation makes time for the other March sisters to falter and flourish. Amy is vivid and real from the jump, with her questioning of her own talents, her sense of being second to Jo, and her truth-telling relationship with Laurie put front and center. Meg’s chance at a life of elegance and plenty, the love that pulls her away from it, and the joys and hardships of that choice are given time to breathe. And Beth remains the heart of the film -- still a little too pure for this world, but one who suffers for her own goodness, reminds a kindly neighbor of what’s been lost, and spurs her sister to take up what she’s put down.
All the while, Little Women is utterly gorgeous to look at through the March Sisters’ misadventures. Gerwig and cinematographer Yorick Le Saux capture the bucolic beauty of scene after scene draped in New England splendor. The pair construct tableaus of faraway elegance and local beauty in turn. But these visuals aren’t gratuitous. Beyond making the movie a treat to watch, it helps sell the contrast at the heart of the film. Scenes set in Jo’s youth have a golden hue, an inviting glow that conveys the idyllic, hopeful tone of those early days. And the ones set in her adulthood are darker and starker, visually communicating the various cold realities the March family has had to grapple with in later years.
As necessary as it is to contend with those cold realities, it’s just plain fun to vicariously share in the joy that Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy share with their mother and friends in their family home. Apart from its structural choices, apart from its character focus, the greatest strength of Gerwig’s Little Women is how well it captures this sense of young people at play, of a headstrong young woman in their element, and that unfathomable, spontaneous vigor of youth.
The March Sisters, and their friends and close confidants, fight and babble and hug and exalt together. There’s a move toward Gilmore-esque speed and overlap in conversation after conversation, expressing the happy chaos that envelops these lives. This story is founded on the breadth of possibility forged in such a simple, familiar environment, on the pleasures and satisfactions found despite absences and meager means, on blessings shared and passed around. The warmth of the March household would not work if those who orbit and inhabit it, did not seem so real in their rough-and-tumble interactions and simple joys.
Those joys, however, are meant to run up against the expectations of adulthood that clash with allowances of youth. That’s the role Aunt March plays -- the naysayer to the slack existence her brother and his wife and children have made for each other. But Gerwig does not make her a villain. Instead, she is merely practical, a woman who knows from her own experiences which choices are permitted and which invite difficulties, delivered with an amusing wryness that makes her endearing even as she aims to stifle her nieces’ dreams.
That’s the crux of Gerwig’s adaptation. The March sisters imagine wondrous lives for one another, borne on the backs of each’s great talent. Jo pictures herself as a bold writer in the big city who never marries anything but her art. Meg sees glimpses of a life where she’ll never have to work, where there’s time for things like acting and society and beautiful dresses. Amy envisions the life of the genius painter overseas who stands with giants. And each finds those dreams running aground on the many limitations of the real world, with tethers made extra taut for the declaratively fairer sex.
All except for Beth, whose dreams lie in the simple doing of good, the making of music for those around to hear it rather than for the masses, despite her prodigious abilities. She is the cinch of Little Women, not merely in her death which brings the March sister home. But in her life of quiet kindness at home, in her peace with what must come and the joy to be found despite it, a joy they found together in the attic and can still share and revive no matter how big or little they are now.
Jo, Amy, and Meg each regains a measure of that golden glow in the shadow of the house they grew up in. Amy loses the artists life in Paris she imagines, but finds happiness in a partner who vindicates her talents and for whom love triumphs over station. Meg is denied by circumstance of the beautiful things and easy life she once pictured, but is buoyed by the care and satisfaction of family and a life built with the man she loves. Even Jo turns away from the “spicy” stories that sell to stuffy cigar-smoking New York publishers and finds her truth, finds her greatness, in the bonds fraught and familiar at home, with a winking-but-joyous connection to a beau of her own. And each is seen sharing the fruits of their talents, passing them on to a new generation of young men and women.
There’s a degree of wish-fulfillment to the close of the film, a heartstring-tugging image of familial warmth in a bucolic setting. But Gerwig earns that warmth. The happiness crafted in a humble home is measured against the metes and bounds of the wider world, and found no less worthy. The choices afforded to women of any station at the time are reckoned with and suffered in, with the ensuing joys and small, self-possessed rebellions made more potent in that unfair crucible. The losses each suffers, the distance between the lives they dreamed and the lives they live, is laid bare in the cuts between past and present.
But in the end, Gerwig does as Alcott did, and makes the fulfillment each chooses meaningful by those terms. The hardships great and small each endures, make it more than a publisher-mandated happy ending when, despite that difference between past imagination and present truth, each of these little women realizes they’re living the lives they truly want.
Searching is the new thriller directed by Aneesh Chaganty. Widowed father David Kim (John Cho) searches for his missing teenage daughter (Michelle La) with the help of multiple laptops and hard-talking detective Rosemary Vick (Debra Messing). All the action takes place on screens; the mystery unfolds through texts, FaceTime, YouTube and video blogs.
While some may have their doubts about watching what is essentially a filmed set of screens for nearly two hours, this unusual set up soon feels natural. After all, many of us spend a lot more than two hours without looking away from a screen in our daily lives.
The portrayal of familiar online habits on the big screen is cleverly used for comic effect. The constant rewriting of messages and the replacement of the jovial exclamation mark for the famously passive aggressive full stop is fully relatable and funny to watch. Some of the visuals are also arresting because they are taken out of their familiar context. Most notably, David’s screen saver is transformed into an enormous malignant jellyfish when shown without the borders of a laptop.
The clever parallels between the title, Searching, and the extensive use of search engines (particularly Apple’s “Finder”) throughout the film invite us to look at how we use the internet. Google asks us to “Search Google or type URL,” but when the missing object is a person rather than the answer to inane questions, these words take on a much more frightening currency.
Searching maintains a fantastic tension throughout the search for Margot. The contrast of the horror of the situation and recognisable ordinariness of the technological format is extremely effective in unsettling the audience.
The twists are truly chilling. By the end, there are perhaps just too many wrenching turns, which slightly dents the believability of the film. This is the only thing stopping Searching from getting a solid five-star review. It is a wonderfully sharp, brutally tense and inventively shot thriller that shows the blossoming possibilities of technology in film.
This movie was ... special, I wouldn't call it a masterpiece or a perfect film but this movie is like no other romance movie. Instead of only showing the best parts to make you feel warm feelings, it shows you everything and all in one night. And what is truly special about this movie is that it is realistic, I mean you can imagine that a story like this could indeed be possible, it's about seizing the opportunities as they come instead of just watching life happen and not doing anything. I, myself, feel that there are many moments within my life's history, that if I had acted differently, my life would not be the same, I have so many "What if" moments. And, I watch these kinds of movies, not only to feel good or sad for a short amount of time but also to show me examples of situations where there actually is an opportunity to seize. Not many guys watch as much romance movies as I watch. I do it because it guides me in life. This movie was also special because of the different ideas that the two main characters share, instead of introducing some crazy story to the plot, all they did was, make the characters talk and talk and share ideas about love, about relationships, about death, about everything. If I could write decimals in my ratings, I would give this movie a 7.5/10. Not a 10 because of how little it made me feel but I still liked it nonetheless and it was indeed special in itself.
Google were right to feature this film on Chrome's "New Tab" page when it came out. It's breathtaking. Lion deserves a 10/10 for cinematography.
I wish I could agree with the choice to cast Dev Patel in the lead role, though. Apart from the difference in skin tone, Patel's Saroo spent a lot of the film playing something of a sex icon. As amazing as the story is, I found the execution disappointing in the area of character development. Saroo himself didn't really get fleshed out, and as a result he remains kind of a cardboard cutout, a place for the viewer to self-insert and imagine how it would feel to be in his place.
One other big issue: Saroo's adopted brother. We find out almost nothing about him over the course of the film. His obvious mental illness/disability is sidelined to just a couple of scenes—sidelined to the point of being irrelevant. As the viewer, we know it exists, but that's all. We don't know what it is, or if he's undergoing treatment, or if he tried treatment and it failed to help, or how it's really affecting his life. Its effect on Sue is alluded to in a few places, but nothing about Mantosh himself.
It irks me a bit that the film devoted so much screen time to Saroo flicking the Google Earth map around. Some of that time could have been spent further developing characters, perhaps showing some of Saroo's life growing up. Skipping ahead 20 years deprived the audience of opportunities to watch Saroo adapt to life in Australia.
All that said, I realize that this film is essentially a pseudo-biography of living people, and as such there must have been limitations on what the film was able to show. So I can't lop off a mess of rating points for the perceived holes in the screenplay. And besides, it was still a damn enjoyable film.
Before I give thoughts on the show, first let me explain the episodes/season number mix-up. The original Spanish release of this show is only 3 seasons total. Netflix decided to turn 3 seasons into 5 parts, and they turned the first seasons 15 episodes into 22 (by cutting down the runtime to 45 minutes rather than 65).
So season 1 on Trakt is equivalent to part 1 AND 2 on Netflix (though Netflix has 22 episodes compared to 15 on here - but it's the same content, the episodes are just edited shorter on Netflix).
Season 2 on Trakt is equivalent to part 3 AND 4 on Netflix. On Netflix, both parts are 8 episodes each, and those correspond perfectly with the 16 episode season 2 on Trakt.
Finally, season 3 is the only one that actually matches up the epsiode numbers exactly on here and on Netflix - though it's called part 5 on Netflix.
Now some thoughts on the show: this is a hard show to recommend or talk about. The first heist (season 1 on here) is very good, and it's some of the best heist/crime TV you'll see. I was hooked from start to finish (despite some small plot holes or unbelievability). 8.5/10
But after the first heist, things go downhill VERY quickly. The rest of the show is based around one more heist, and for the most part, it's an entertaining watch. But what was a pretty well written show, suddenly becomes a badly written show, filled with character inconsistencies, plot holes, and a whole new level of unbelievability. The first 8 episodes of what is season 2 on here (part 3 on Netflix) is pretty good. But the 8 episodes that come after are not so good. Overall, it's an entertaining watch, but a HUGE step down compared to what came before. Season 2 gets a 6.5/10.
Lastly, we come to season 3 (part 5 on Netflix). This season is just bad. Aside from the last 2 episodes, it's not good at all outside from a few decent moments. I've truly never seen a TV show deteriorate in quality so quickly and consistently as this one does, especially not when a show started off so great in the beginning. 4.5/10 (would be lower if not for the satisfying finale).
I'd recommend watching the first heist (season 1/parts 1 & 2) but unless you're really keen on being disappointed, don't watch any further. Fortunately it's not a long watch.
There's a lot of intriguing ideas here, unfortunately it kind of feels like they've all been done before. It doesn't help that The Boys feels a little bit cheap due to a mix of budget constraints, production design and a few real misfires in casting. The storytelling is often scattershot and I even at the end of the season I feel like I haven't been properly introduced to quite a few characters and their development was extremely weak (notably A-Train, The Deep). There's an immaturity to it all that just prevents it going from good to great a little too often.
There's a lot of strong stuff, though. Jack Quaid as Hughie is fantastic and credibly portrays someone really out of his depth who's getting swept away. Karl Urban is definitely playing a very exaggerated character (with a dodgy attempt at an accent), but he makes it work and the character is great fun. The dark humour works more often than not, even when it's unexpected. Erin Moriarty as Annie/Starlight is a real bright spot in an otherwise grim show. The show presents a gloriously America-centric point of view and makes no apologies for it, presenting issues that feel unique to its set up and location and can certainly inspire a lot of debate (which did indeed happen among my housemates and I).
The show is often gratuitous to the point of absurdity, but it's not a massive issue with only a few moments that felt genuinely unnecessary, just put in there to satisfy gore hounds. This applies to the characters too, many of whom are unbelievably shitty people. This super cynical viewpoint was often a turn off for me.
I still found more to like than dislike here, but this could be a lot better. The show takes 8 episodes to tell very little story and there isn't much to really get invested in. And has Simon Pegg ever been more miscast than here?
I like to think that TV, as a medium, has come a long way from what it was about a decade ago, where network TV was still dominant. Now we love that TV is every little bit as good as movies, there are real stories, characters that act like real people (as opposed to characters that act like tv characters), and you wouldn't find it hard to believe that what you're watching is real or could be real (unless the separation from reality is intentional).
Obviously, network TV is still around and despite their best efforts to keep up with the times, this type of content is still being made there, but rarely elsewhere. Plus, the entrance of Netflix and other streaming platforms, including Mrs Maisel's Amazon, has pushed the needle on this front, to the extent that you'd find it hard to believe that a show could be made, netowrk-style, somewhere that is not network TV.
Enter The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, a show that is set 1958 but could've been litterally on air in 1958 and it would fit right in, a show so network TV it's hard to believe that it's on Amazon.
It's not a bad show, per se, it's not doing anything new, really. Amy Sherman Palladino is just doing a period Gilmore Girls with one chick in the lead instead of two. You know, too much dialogue, walk and talk to give the illusion of something is happening when it's not really, and everyone is a cartoonish version of what they're supposed to be (e.g. overly jewish parents), and everything is rosy and nothing is grim about the world that the characters live in.
It's all fine, maybe you like this kind of stuff (which is okay), but I always felt like we have left this stuff behind to real stories with real people with real problems that might not go away magically just like that, which is not the case here, you can always count on the fact that the eponymous Mrs. Maisel would come out on top in almost every episode, which -- frankly -- starts to get annoying real quick.
It's a good show, maybe in 2005. Right now? it's just another brick in the wall.
The second season of Ted Lasso struggles a bit with the sudden realization that this show is a hit that might end up lasting a long time. The opening season pitched us with one of the most charming and likeable characters we've seen this side of Paddington and captured a lot of the wholesome heart that is desperately reassuring to so many people on edge with the state of the world. Season one soothed me when I felt extremely broken and burnt out in my career and I'm not ashamed to admit that I cried a lot while watching it because it was so healing to experience a show about goodness bringing people together. Season two operates a little differently because this is no longer about Ted settling in to coach a soccer team. This season, instead, is about the soccer team itself. Hell, Ted is actually in shockingly little of the season in its entirety. It became more exploratory in a way that was refreshing, even if I did wish it stuck to its guns a bit more. But never once did I watch an episode this season and walk away disappointed because the writing retains all of the wit I fell in love with from season one.
There's deeper lessons and questions in season two. Whereas season one felt altogether more concerned with being wholesome feelgood television, the sequel season challenges the viewer a bit more. Whereas Ted in season one is the loveable underdog who is relentlessly kind, season two digs into those traits and unpacks them. Ted isn't flawless--and this season dares to point the finger at his faults so that he, too, can begin to grow. This sort of challenging writing I deeply respect. Because although I would have preferred more of season one's stuff, I can't deny that it probably would have grown a bit stale without any sort of deeper prodding.
Ted Lasso seems to understand that the path to being a better person isn't a straight line. There are ripples and stumbles along the way and there's always more to do. I appreciated the moments where we spend more time understanding Nate as his own character, or an entire episode about Coach Beard all separate from Ted. It creates realer people and a more well-rounded ensemble. It might have been slightly awkward in the moment, but I do think this creates necessary stepping stones on the way to a larger whole where each character is fully fleshed out--hopefully to then double down on its wholesome atmosphere.
All in all, I found season two to be an extremely enjoyable and solid bit of television, even if I found the growing pains its going through awkward at times. It occasionally gets to the heights that is the knockout of its debut season, but struggles to stay there as consistently. As a southern boy, I am so drawn to and inspired by Ted's charm and I anxiously await season three.
