Got my 4 wisdom teeth removed on Monday so i'm currently in semi-bedrest while I recover. They gave me a dumb looking bandana-like contraption to keep ice gels at my cheeks. It really helps, and giving seductives glances to my boyfriend while wearing it has been a hoot.
Discovered the series Anne - based on the Anne of Green Gables books and have been binging it since (netflix). I really like the deepness and growth of the characters and love how truly Canadian it is. They go a bit overboard on the wokeness factor at times, but I appreciate the effort.
If you're looking for a new series to watch, I'd give it a try :)
Any series recommendations? Movie wise, the Ghibli stuff is on the list to watch or re-watch for sure.
Pose (first season only) The Wire (of course) Sex education (its fun and well made) Unorthodox (great attention to detail, of you even wondered how ultrorthodox jews live) Avatar the last Airbender (it is as good as people say it is) Atypical Babylon Berlin (fantastic German production) Sense8 (I liked it. Give it 3/4 episodes and see how you like it)
A tad embarrassed to recommend this, or ask you, but have you seen Dark? I find it difficult to get excited or enthusiastic about most TV now - I think we're way past the "peak" of the infamous Peak TV. Frankly it's hard to imagine anything topping the likes of The Sopranos, Deadwood or The Wire, but this might be a worthy outlier. It is for me.
My recommendation is going to seem odd, but it really is enchanting: Time Team It is a British show that ran from the early 1990s, where a team of archaeologists perform 3-day archaeological digs to answer specific questions. Like they get a letter from some farmer in Sussex who asks them to "figure out what these weird lumpy rings are in my field." The team consists of the goofball presenter - Tony Robinson of Blackadder fame - the tech guys with their geophysical technology, the "digger" archaeologist who runs and performs the digs themselves, the historian who combs through libraries and old documents to unearth documentary evidence, and the landscape historian who can walk around an area and maps the "lumps and bumps" to discern what may be underground, or why the landscape is the shape it is. Finally, there's Vic, their illustrator, who help you visualize what this broken piece of pottery might be from, or how the village would have looked in Roman times. The whole thing is just enchanting. Very British, but also a lot of fun. The first two seasons they respond to letters from people asking specific questions, and then they go and try to answer the questions, using all their skills and tools. They end each day in a local pub, drinking and chatting about what they found today, and what they will do tomorrow. On the end of the third day they give a presentation to the local community showing what they have found. Later seasons, the Time Team are famous, and are invited to excavate and explore protected areas that no other archaeological team has been allowed to touch, as well as the oddball lumps and bumps in farmers fields. The process of deduction is exposed for the viewer to see, completely. The first day they think they might have uncovered one thing, but the second day, more information comes to light and they change what they are doing and looking at and how they are thinking about it, and the third day it may change entirely again! They are completely honest with their evaluations, and admit when they are right or wrong, and go into detail about what clues led them one way, and which finds didn't fit that conclusion and made them re-think it all. It's just wonderful fun. Fascinating. And its surprisingly culturally broad - men, women, children, all different races, and everyone working together and respecting each other's expertise and value to the service of the scientific process. My wife and I love it.
Anne is pretty great. My wife was a fan and she got me involved. I don't think they could easily have done that character in that time period in that era without getting pretty deep into aboriginal abuse; the fact that they do gender, sexuality and inequality is cool as far as I'm concerned. If you like Anne you should probably give The Order a try. It's got a pretty serious Xena tongue-in-cheek vibe that they never quite nail? But it's fun. Longmire is Murder, She Wrote if instead of Angela Landbury you've got one of the Agents from Matrix along with Starbuck from Battlestar and Lou Diamond Phillips. And if instead of being in a really murdery New England town it's in New Mexico pretending to be Montana. That entire series was filmed a two hour drive from the house I grew up in. The tonal shift from "Produced by A&E" to "produced by Netflix" is pretty jarring but you get over it. The first season of Broadchurch is great. The rest are the opposite of great. These are all of a continuum; "if you like this you'll like that". If there are two shows that I would wholeheartedly recommend just because they are brilliant they are (DO NOT SO MUCH AS LOOK AT THAT THREAD UNTIL YOU HAVE WATCHED THE SHOW, ALL OF IT) and
Another rowdy and whole-hearted endorsement for Longmire and Halt and Catch Fire. Anybody could love Longmire. It's just an excellent story with fascinating characters, and is really well acted. I wanna know these people. Halt and Catch Fire is about a VERY pivotal time in my life, when the computer industry boom was just starting in the late 1970's, early 1980's. Even if the subject matter isn't of interest to you, they do an utterly astonishing job of recreating the 1980's as they actually were, and it was the beginning of a cultural turning point. Prior to this time, the only "interesting" or "cool" geeks were astronauts from the Apollo program. In H&CF, the geeks finally come up with something everyone else wants, and catch the eye of salespeople, marketing people, executive businessmen. And the culture clash between these geeks who just want to make something pure and perfect, and the "business types" who see a product to market and sell, is very much the initial spark that got the world where it is today, in an eternal battle between art and marketing. These tech guys were artists, and their art was stolen by the businesspeople. Sound familiar? H&CF is not fast paced or shocking or tantalizing. It is just a great story, told well.
I have explained H&CF as "Mad Men, except the people in it suffer for being assholes rather than thriving." Mad Men is a bunch of broken people careening and colliding through the '60s. There is no causality to speak of, no one ever suffers consequences for their choices and everyone who attempts to improve their own lot and the lot of those around them pays inhumane penalties. The people who suffer the most in Mad Men are the idealists, and they suffer at the willing and intentional hands of the narcissists. The people who like Mad Men are the people who hated the ending of Game of Thrones because the blue-eyed blonde naif always gets the guy, right? I mean, we've been taught that. They're the ones who think The Social Network is a superhero origin story. Mad Men is of, for and by nihilists. H&CF is full of human people who hurt other human people despite knowing that they shouldn't and it ends up putting them in a worse position and they end up having to deal with more problems as a consequence. Drama in H&CF is wholly based on people making the wrong choices and then having to deal with the outcome. People are broken for a reason; people heal or don't heal for a reason. Relationships evolve. Actions play out over seasons. H&CF is of, for and by people who believe in karma.
Mad Men, for me, was also an explanation of why the fuckwit assholes in Marketing always had it better than us developers, who, ya know, actually wrote the fucking software. Mad Men was just morally bankrupt opportunists making buckets of money for intangible and unfalsifiable reasons. They made up the ratings system their success was measured by, and then - as if by magic! - were hugely successful. Clearly they were more skilled and more valuable than the people who invented the fucking product in the first place, because they made up "It's toasted." Mad Men was cathartic for me; yeah, the shitheads won, but because they were empty and soulless, they never enjoyed their success... they just craved more. And it helps me understand politicians for what they really are.
The fact that they talk about feminism, gay and aboriginal and black people etc is really cool. I really appreciate it and it would be a glaring omission to ignore it altogether. It's just that sometimes it comes out a bit talking-pointy and awkward. Like when 16 year old girls talk about kissing and one of them says something like "It's not okay if both people don't consent". Sure - but it's not a very believable dialog line and pulled me straight out of the time period illusion. I'm sure as we produce more socially conscious content, we'll get better at integrating it into a story more naturally :)
I watched this with my family. The kids liked it. My wife read the books and watched the original series when she was a little girl and is a "purist," when it comes to anything "Green Gables," and she liked it too. The actress that plays Anne does a phenomenal job. I also that that the actors that play Marilla and Mathew were great. All around, an awesome show. It introduced me to this amazing song: Regarding what I've been watching. I'm not ashamed to say that the greatest show I've watched in a while is "Future Man." It's so dumb on the surface, but upon digging deeper, it's pretty damned phenomenal. The character arc of "Wolf," is unlike anything I've ever seen. It's dumb. It's hilarious. It's vulgar and it's provocative. It plays with genre and has a TON of culture references. It's a lot of fun. Check it out .
Please check out What We Do in the Shadows, if you can! It's fantastic. IMDB it, at least.