How did you like that movie / TV show / book?

cool... i'll take a listen when i get back, steve.

as for pearl jam, i still routinely listen to their crazy-different version of "someday at xmas" that stevie wonder originally did. i'm not particularly a fan of theirs, but that one was pretty genius i thought.
 
That's an amazing mellow version of "Rolling Stone". This one is the exact opposite. Right after a limey nitwit calls him Judas because he dared to plug in his guitar (the monster!), you can hear Bob tell The Band to "play it fucking loud!" They do. They also play it fucking great.

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Guess that's the difference that uppers vs downers make, though a great artisan competes their craft as only those that can assume their third person knows.
 
well, dang. sherlock kind of petered out, and now i'm left jonesing a bit for a good detective series.

i did try watching a bit of the basil rathbone stuff and found it limp as a stale biscuit. not saying that because i have anything against older movies (i routinely enjoy stuff from the teens and twenties), but the jeremy brett stuff is just leagues better IMO.

then i tried watching a couple poirot episodes with david suchet, but he's such an annoying character that i just don't see myself getting in to it. agatha christie herself even came to hate him after a few years, according to WP.

"murder, she wrote" with angela lansbury was pleasant, but thoroughly TV-ish and dominated by TV conventions. it's funny how columbo is an even more dated series, also obeying the all-important TV format, yet still rises well above it, somehow. i think maybe sometimes a show needs to take itself seriously and sometimes it needs to lighten up...
 
No doubt about it Adam West was quintessential.
 
Thank God I wasn't trying to date a girl in the 50's.

"You don't understand what he means to me, Ike!!"


Turn Me Loose - Fabian - YouTube


(like, Scooby-- hopefully Fabian had a fetish for bobby-soxers!)
 
"One of Richard Dawson's trademarks on Family Feud, kissing the female contestants, earned him the nickname The Kissing Bandit. Television executives repeatedly tried to get him to stop the kissing.[7] After receiving criticism for the practice, he asked viewers to write in and vote on the matter. The mail response was 704 against and 14,600 in favour.[8] On the 1985 finale, Dawson explained that he kissed contestants for love and luck, something his mother did with Dawson himself as a child.[1][9] Some viewers complained when he kissed the cheeks of non-white women, but in a 2010 interview he defended his actions, saying that "It's very important to me that on Family Feud I could kiss all people... I kissed black women daily and nightly on Family Feud for 11 years, and the world didn’t come to an end, did it?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawson#Game_show_hosting

Hmmph.
 
Can we be certain that he wasn't simply auditioning ladies for his next 'Bob Barker Moment'?
 
Oh yeah, THIS thread.

As it happens, the most common form of fiction I currently partake in is bandes dessinees and graphic novels. The stuff I go for in particular reads a lot like movies as a matter of fact. The advantage for me is that I can stop and start far more easily than I can with an actual movie. That, and admire the craftmanship of the art.

Now I do write a lot of reviews about that stuff, but unfortunately, it's at a different public venue with a lot of eyes on it. I'd rather not crosspost my writing over here, for reasons of security.

That said, I do watch video snippets on Youtube all the time, and am indeed rewatching The Sting (1973) these days. I also need to finish watching that Welsh movie that Elton turned me on to a couple years ago(!)

I guess I could post some of the cool YT stuff I run in to, if there's interest. For example, there's "Joseph's Machines." Joseph is a New Zealand chap living in NYC who makes fabulous, hilarious Rube Goldberg machines. Here's one of my faves:

 
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Jumanji: The Next Level, I rate it a 7, good action flick same old story, some comic moments, plenty of action, so no really dull moments and only rates a 7 because they tried very hard using as many big time name actors as they could. Still it falls short by being too formulated, never the less reasonable entertainment so long as you do not expect anything new.

 
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So... I've been watching my share of Seinfeld clips on YT, lately. Somehow, 20+ years after the show's ending, I'm still trying to make up my mind what I think about it. Certainly I don't hate it, but I'm not in love with it, either. Watching the clips is mostly a fun experience, but I'm not sure I'd actually be able to sit through a full episode.

I think one of the problems for me is that the show takes a concept or an event, then frequently spends the rest of the episode completely wallowing in it. For example, if... let's say Tim the Dentist (Bryan Cranston) makes an early appearance and exits off-screen, then it's pretty much guaranteed that for the rest of the ep, every other character that appears is going to have some kind of attachment to Tim or an anecdote or experience about dentistry. What I'm saying is, humorous coincidences and cosmic synchronicity is a fine schtick, but Seinfeld the show kind of takes that wagon and drives it off the side of a cliff, sometimes.

Another example of wallowing: George's father (Jerry Stiller) gets himself a pool table, and for whatever reason, installs it in the smallest room in his house. Kramer comes over to play, and we get five minutes or whatever depicting the two spending hours awkwardly trying to shoot pool, relentlessly bumping the cue on the walls and the table. Evidently the pair fail to have the lightbulb come on above their heads that the room's just too damn small. Besides the immediate problem of the joke being overplayed, the larger point here is that the characters in Seinfeld are expressly designed never to learn anything or grow. This is actually one of the show's internal doctrines.

So you have a really clever show concept (i.e. shining a spotlight on life's little absurdities) and a humorous character rule (that these people never grow), but when you overplay these things so endlessly, the show becomes... actually not as interesting, less funny, and even kind of depressing. Now that may sound like unnecessary overanalysis, but when you have a show that ran almost 200 episodes, well... I guess some things tend to be boiled down at the bottom of the cauldron, and you can't help but notice. Again, I think the clips work better for me than the actual episodes, for reasons such as these.

Btw, unlike a show such as The Simpsons, I understand this show doesn't translate well around the world due to culture and language differences. Does it even get played in Oz, Wales, or other English-speaking countries around the world? I'm not sure of that, either.
 
mmm...Seinfeld yes it does air down under and I rate as AOK better then most free to air pap and better then most US sitcoms, if nothing else is on air it's a worthy time filler I guess, there was a certain chemistry that made the show watchable.

I'd say I'd go Friends or Cheers over and above it slightly...

That said I rate The Big Bang Theory a cut above them all...

 
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Yes it has aired in Wales ... pretty sure I've seen it on the tv schedules but I've never seen it. It falls into the caregory of 'I may watch this one day if I've feck all else to do'
Like the Simpsons, Frazer, South Park, Friends etc atc. Plus a load more that do not come to mind right now.

I'm rather selective about tv viewing .... mainly some sports F1, cricket, rugby then after 9pm I prefer to watch a film or read but that's about all the viewing I do. Plus catch a local news. The main news is always doom and bloody gloom, climate change, Brexit, Trump, transgender issues ... cannot be arsed with any of that. Always somebody being offended by the remotest little thing and that in itself takes over. Bah humbug!
 
...there was a certain chemistry that made the show watchable.
You know there's an interesting clip on YT of Jason Alexander (who played George) talking about how they made that chemistry work in such bland, uninteresting settings such as Jerry's apartment and the diner. The idea was that the core castmates learned how to create an unusually high number of acting opportunities for each other to work with. Not unlike soccer assists, for example. He also talked about how, unlike a lot of shows, the cast sort of doubled as writers. Seems the scripts were very much working drafts, and the cast would play around with the dialogue and frequently re-work it or straight up improvise new dialogue.

And, oh boy... the Big Bang Theory. I think I'd better just shut up about that one.

Like the Simpsons, Frazer, South Park, Friends etc
I hope you get a chance to watch some early Simpsons episodes (up to about season 9 or 10). In comparison to Zombie Simpsons (what we have now), that was a wickedly good show once upon a time. That said, watching it nowadays, it might not come off quite as cleverly as it did in the early to mid 90's.

South Park is an interesting mention because so much of it is topical and current, very much like the news you mention. Actually, the show's creators relentlessly and mercilessly mock some of the very things you were complaining about. South Park might actually be a good fit for you, I'm thinking!

One last little comment-- it strikes me that Frasier might have some extra appeal to folks in the UK, due to two of the main characters (Frasier and Niles) being counterparts to the stereotypically British snobby, refined elites. Naturally, a recurring motif of the show is them getting their comeuppances. Not that such a formula's anything new at this point, but I'm guessing that it might be interesting to see how Americans do that kind of thing. Either way, it's simply a damn good show. Not sure we ever talked about it in this thread, either.
 
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