MemberlistThe Library Index  FAQFAQ   SearchSearch   RegisterRegister   ProfileProfile   Log in to check your private messagesLog in to check your private messages   Log inLog in 
AE on Telly News (NEW CONCEPTS)
Reply to topic Goto page Previous  1, 2, 3 ... 97, 98, 99 ... 145, 146, 147  Next
View previous topic :: View next topic  
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Anatomy of a Scandal (Netflix)

This much trumpeted series has landed among us and, as is my duty, it falls to me to tell you whether or not to bother. After the first episode the answer is 'Yes-ish.' It is remarkably old fashioned. It would fit right into BBC-2. So watchable but not hosanna-singing territory. This is odd because Netflix can generally be relied on to be innovatory but non-watchable.
Send private message
Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
View user's profile
Reply with quote

The real problem with most TV is not that it's Woke, it is the over reliance on Pathos, and Fantasy at the expense of Logos.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Highly disagree, apart from Pathos, Logos and Aramis. Fantasy is a genre and can be done well or badly. I find Woke not only drives me quietly mad in itself, it is a sure sign the program itself will be blandly conventional (or blandly over-excited as the convention is nowadays).

A good programme maker assumes convention and runs with it. In other words everyone will be Woke but you don't notice it.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Opera Italia BBC-4

I can't stand opera but I had to watch this three-part history of Italian opera for sociological reasons. It was OK because I could fast forward through the musicky bits though I was a bit irritated to find that I only got about fifteen minutes of history per one hour prog.

One bit of enlightenment I received is that there are wheelchair-bound opera singers in Italy. This seemed reasonable because opera itself requires so much suspension of belief that having the Barber of Seville singing a love duet with a woman in a wheelchair only adds to the merriment.

But it set me to wondering when it is going to reach more familiar shores. We have (just about but I think we really have) accepted black faces in Tudor costume dramas but Richard III coming on stage in a wheelchair complaining about a bad back is going to take some getting used to.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Hansel & Gretel: After Ever After Sky

But PS to the above I had to stop watching what seemed to be a quite rollicking David Walliams-penned Hansel and Gretel sequel because a black youth had been cast as Hansel. Every time I caught sight of him, i.e. every minute, I couldn't get the PC aspect out of my mind. Fairy Stories have to be believable at some level of the primitive brain and I had found mine was too primitive to cope.
Send private message
Grant



View user's profile
Reply with quote

The idiots who promote this nonsense ignore the fact that when we watch a film or play we go into a sort of trance in which we believe it’s all really true. But it’s easy for this suspension of disbelief to be broken. If Caesar’s wife is black, as in a recent Julius & Caesar I saw, it breaks the spell.

Nine years ago I saw a 76 year old Vanessa Redgrave play Beatrice in Much Ado with an 82 year old James Earl Jones as her boyfriend. Jones had to sit on a chair when he got too tired to stand.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

A lot of people ask me which cable TV service I recommend and my advice is always the same, "Prise up a paving slab and have a look at which cables pass your house. If it includes Virgin, choose them because of the weekly offers."

Rent The Batman before 18th May to be entered into our prize draw for your chance to win a Batman cowl or a Batman chest armour glyph.
Send private message
Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Grant wrote:
The idiots who promote this nonsense ignore the fact that when we watch a film or play we go into a sort of trance in which we believe it’s all really true. But it’s easy for this suspension of disbelief to be broken. If Caesar’s wife is black, as in a recent Julius & Caesar I saw, it breaks the spell


I am easily hypnotised. Providing she was hot, I will always suspend disbelief, in fact I make up my own plot lines. They are way better.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

I side with Libby Two-Shoes on this one. You quickly get used to any kind of convention, even a PC-mandated one. What you (or maybe it's just me) never get used to is if the PC-mandate is shoved into your face. This is what did it for me with the black Hansel. A black pretty Gretel might get through because, as you say, being hot takes your mind off it. A black Hansel and Gretel might have been OK in a we're-in-wonderland sort of way. Oh, and by the way, H & G's parents were both white. Wicked and white in Walliams' take on the story. Especially her since she must have been playing away from home, the dirty mare.

A black witch would stir a different pot but I didn't stay long enough to find out. She is conventionally green-tinged.
Send private message
Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
View user's profile
Reply with quote

It seems to Wiley that diversity casting is required not because of political correctness but simply because global corporations want it, just as they want product placement.

That is why films look like ads. Ads don't steal from films, it's now mainly the other way round, what we are seeing is constant remakes of previously well liked films, now designed to look like ads.

I recently saw Death on the Nile, They haven't changed much except give it a few Black characters, and added some pathos. How do they integrate the black characters into the plot. A Jazz club. Next Operation Mincemeat, it couldn't be more English, even Kelly McDonald is required to try and do English (she fails) but where do they hatch the plot, it's the Jazz club.

You leave having just watched a glossier version of the original, but now basically dying for a Southern Comfort, and thinking about buying a car and a phone, living in a muticultural paradise.

They don't surpass the original brilliant ad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEhnUTyPCrc
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

I can see that having a jazz club in Richard the III or Hansel and Gretel might be a problem though Robin Hood generally has a 'saracen' or two in tow brought from the Holy Land. "Fancy coming to England, Abu ben Khazzi?" "Too right, Robin, I'm fed up with these A-rabs treating me like shit just because I'm as black as the ace of spades." But popping in a jazz club where feasible doesn't seem a step too far. As long as the jazz is kept to a minimum. Can't stand the stuff.

But if they try turning 'M' into a woman, that'll be it for the Bond franchise as far as I'm concerned. I've got no qualms about him being a colonel in the KGB if that's what the international market demands. It is fiction after all.
Send private message
Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Robin Hood is a case in point, nobody complained about the kindly saracen, but there was some really unkind stuff about Russell Crowe's accent. It's not his fault he is Australian, and why shouldn't you have an Australian or American Robin in their native accents? The answer is it wouldn't happen in the Jazz club.
Send private message
Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
View user's profile
Reply with quote

The Russian KGB worked all this out, that is why they spun the tale Andropov was a Jazz Lover. Difficult to fight a cold war when the opposition likes Jazz.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

I've taken some soundings, Wiley, and we all agree that's enough jazz references for this year.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

We’re updating our prices – here’s why Netflix

Good-oh, I like things to be up-to-date. I wonder whether it means prices are going up or going down. Perhaps they just mean they will be expressed in Euros from now on. Surely not rubles. As to the why, I'm all agog. To pay for some decent dubbing, one hopes.
Send private message
Display posts from previous:   
Reply to topic Goto page Previous  1, 2, 3 ... 97, 98, 99 ... 145, 146, 147  Next

Jump to:  
Page 98 of 147

MemberlistThe Library Index  FAQFAQ   SearchSearch   RegisterRegister   ProfileProfile   Log in to check your private messagesLog in to check your private messages   Log inLog in 


Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group