641–650 of 1001 posts
The West Wing lived up to the hype for me. People told me to watch it. I've now watched the first 5 seasons probably 5-6 times. I've even met non USA people for whom it's their favorite series ever.
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Blood Meridian is a top 3 book for me. Just fantastic. With one of those endings that takes the book from a 4.5/5 to a 5/5
I also love Blood Meridian -- curious what your other two would be? Mine are probably Moby-Dick and The Brothers Karamazov.
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>A lot of people watch it with no background knowledge and subsequently don’t quite understand the “best film ever” label, but Citizen Kane is indeed a fantastic film. Just read about Orson Welles first. Interesting. About 10 years ago I was tired of modern cinema and completely stopped watching new films. After some pause I decided to start watching classic cinema from 1930 onward in more or less chronological order…
> In general, the quality of 1932-1942 american cinema (and, to a lesser degree, 1945-1950) far exceeded my expectations. Survivorship bias? I'm sure there was as much schlock produced back then as there is now, it's just we elevated the best and have forgotten the rest. Revisiting the bad stuff is the entire premise of MST3K: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_Science_Theater_3000
1. The best films of this period far surpassed my expectations from the technical point of view. And there were a lot of decent-to-exceptional films produced at the time; I could name at least 50 american films worth watching from 1930 to 1950. In comparison, I could hardly name 10 films from 1951 to 1960 that are at least decent (and yes, Paths of Glory, named below, is the best).
I think it was mostly due to the fact that all personnel, connected with the creation of a film at the time were still largely pioneers at the field and they had all possible expertiese in it (films in the 60s and especially in the 70s became noticeably more amateur; 50s suffered due to McCarthy). Movies were still relatively new and there were a lot of innovation in it each year. On top of that, it was a time of the Great Depression and high unemploymend. Hollywood were one of the better off industries and so were able to easlily atrract best of the best.
2. Even B-movies from rich studios had high production values. From the same 1941 I could easily recommend for example The Gay Falcon - Irving Reis - RKO/Nothing But the Truth - Elliott Nugent - Paramount/Charley's Aunt - Archie Mayo - 20 Fox. All are relatively simple, but well worth the watch.
3. What's more important, the 30s and 40s cinema had its own unique style and dynamic, very different from later decades. I'd say it was closer to Imre Kalman and Franz Lehar operettas, rather than more convential movies we are used today. It was, if I may say so, a thing-in-itself, hardly comparable with what came later.
The Illiad. As the foundation of Western literature, it may have received the greatest amount of hype that it is possible to receive. I had attempted to read it and The Odyssey when I was much younger, in middle school, maybe too young, and failed miserably. But as it is always with cultural touchstones, references to it are inescapable, and a few years ago, in my mid 50s I overcame the reluctance accumulated in the…
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I'm still on the fence. I could use a new laptop but everything I've looked at doesn't live up to what I would hope for in terms of battery life and specs. The M1 seems to fit the bill. But I'm hesitant to buy into something that I can't run linux on.
> The M1 seems to fit the bill. But I'm hesitant to buy into something that I can't run linux on. Exactly. Apple is even introducing further restrictions on macOS, to turn it into a closed system like ios totally under Apple's control. (They've already crippled all application firewalls so that they cannot block any apple authorised software from accessing the internet, and they can even bypass VPNs, all in the marke…
Stadia, the initial reviews were actually pretty bad, but I'm blown away by how good it is. There's something undeniably cool about playing cyberpunk on a macbook air with full graphical detail, and then switching over to play on my TV exactly where I left off. The latency is virtually imperceptible to me, and I love that I don't need a 50 GB download just to try out a new game. Everytime I use it I'm honestly impres…
> The latency is virtually imperceptible to me Lucky you, I can't even play on most TVs hooked as-is via HDMI because of horrendous render lag.
Makes me think people that say this have never played on a high end PC, which in turn has lower latency compared to a last gen console. And that's considering the fact that even modern PC have a TON of latency. NVIDIA seems to be working towards that, thankfully.
I bet playing Quake 3 Arena multiplayer on Stadia would be noticeably worse that on a PC from 20 years ago.
Cormac McCarthy. Finally started "bingeing" his books from the local library and not since Virginia Woolf has a writer's use of words to paint pictures made such an impression on me.
Is McCarthy hyped...? I read Blood Meridian because a pretentious literature/philosophy snob I knew in college told me it was good. I was also pretentious, so I read it. Other than that, I've almost never heard anyone talk about his work, other than briefly when the movies came out.
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The Mandalorian has restored the faith in the future of the franchise in millions of fans. Most of us thought Star Wars was over considering how mediocre the last six movies have been but along comes this well-written, fun adventure that manages to tie together the previous movies, animated series and books. Imagine a new trilogy made by Filoni and Favreau - they would absolutely kill it.
is it really well written? “can you help me?” “only if you complete this task that makes you look like a bad ass” repeated 8 times
Even though the formula is simple, the events didn’t feel predictable to me.
And I could easily imagine more complex plot that would be less satisfying to watch.
The Impossible burger is pretty good. I was skeptical. They did a good job creating non animal meat.
Feel free to point me in the right direction if I’m missing a nuance here, but the impossible burger as it appears as a Burger King Whopper alternative is the worst “burger” I’ve ever eaten. I couldn’t even finish it. I like vegetarian patties and I like a good beef burger. The whopper variant had a strange rubbery smell and mouth feel.
The Wire. I'd tried to watch it a few times, but only a few months ago actually got past the first two episodes. I think it helped that I quite quickly saw it as a morally ambiguous discussion of the institutional ineptitude of conservative western cultures in mitigating the effects of crime, rather than a typical 'good vs bad' cop show. With that mindset, the possibly-underwhelming finale of S1 is much more effectiv…
Some of the background they give is that the cast and crew didn't think there would be a Season 2, that David Simon wrote Season 5 without Dennis Lehane or George Pelecanos, etc.
https://www.theringer.com/way-down-in-the-hole Now that The Ringer has been bought by Spotify you might have to be a subscriber to listen to it.