But Is It on Netflix? - Streaming Video Service Thread: Hulu, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, Disney+, Peacock, YouTube TV, AT+T Watch, Philo, Playstation Vue, HBO Max, HBO Now, Facebook Live and many more

I watched Le Choc du Futur, one of this year's SXSW films, on Amazon Prime. It's about a young woman in 1978 Paris with an apartment full of analog synths, trying to create the next new thing. Pretty much Moodles fanfic.

Know what is on amazon prime and is super duper topical? SOMEONE I TOUCHED, starring Cloris Leachman. It's about a syphilis outbreak and the contact tracer who has to tell people "guess what, you've been exposed"

TV movie! Recommended if you just can't get enough contagion irl

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwjjK61JXZM

that video clip is great!

The whole movie is enjoyable — would recommend for 1975 TV movie contagion entertainment!

Theme song is sung by Cloris Leachman herself

The Normal People adaptation is good

yeah started it last night and was dubious with the first episode but it gets it's stride rather quickly. the one thing that throws it off slightly, or at least makes me rethink things about the book, is that Daisy Edgar-Jones is hardly unattractive, or awful, or gross, which was really how I'd thought she was supposed to be before she went to University. So the discomfort he has with being with her seems really weird if you've only seen the series. But both of them are very good. As it is television, there are bits of it that are far more sentimental than how I took the book, where the love scenes can be graphic, but it's a bit brutal and almost clinical.

yeah, her casting does strain credibility for sure. And the accent slips now and again

the guy who plays Connell is brilliant though. Only his second screen role or something

yeah, I actually think they're both extraordinary and now I am in love with Daisy Edgar Jones forever so you know I'm not complaining.

the supporting garbage men are also extremely well cast - the schoolmates, Marianne's brother, the college boyfriends. I've met all those types

I'm six episodes in and I feel like they cut a lot of the brother stuff out. maybe more happened near the second half of the book? I now can't recall.

Ok, finished. I found the very ending seemed much more ambiguous than the book, which was a little ambiguous but I certainly came away from it with a reasonable feeling about what was going to happen. Maybe it was just me.

I certainly hope they don't try to make a second season of this though.

I doubt it, but Lenny Abrahamson and Alice Birch are also adapting Conversations with Friends for the BBC

that'll be interesting. I quite like both of these novels but Normal People has a leg up on having two characters I actually liked and cared about despite them making frustrating and stupid decisions over and over and over. Conversations had two main characters who I thought were deeply unlikeable. It's still a great book.

We watched the odd Parks and Rec reunion/benefit show, which was better than it had any right to be, while still being totally contrived and goofy. So many great people on that show, and almost all of them showed up.

On Hulu/Peacock

Upload on Amazon is pretty good. Interesting that Greg Daniels and Michael Shur went on from Parks and Rec to both make shows about the afterlife.

Opposing viewpoint after two episodes: Upload is not good. Actors are not great (plus everybody is too pretty/character is too shitty), writing is by the numbers and draw everything out unnecessarily, the larger MYSTERY isn't interesting me in the slightest and the constant product placement undercuts the cynical themes in a really cynical way.

Daniels didn't really work on Parks & Rec after the pilot afaik, so it looks more like him specifically chasing his decade-ago collaborator's more recent success

Opposing viewpoint after two episodes: Upload is not good.

yeah this. i binged three and lost interest. what’s great about the show (the concept, the future vision, the dramatic elements) is so undermined by a complete lack of charisma that it feels more like a tech showcase than a fully developed series.

nathan might as well be a robot. i couldn’t give two shits what happens to him. nora’s drawn to nathan because the story needs her to be. nathan’s girlfriend is so superficially villainous that i struggle to see her as anything more than a plot device. and how is this show set only 13 years in the future?

i’ll watch it to the end because there’s enough here to enjoy, but i will definitely keep drifting off, and i really doubt i’ll care what happens to whom.

Yeah - the same. It's not great - but I'll finish it. The episodes are short, and there's just enough mileage in the concept to keep it going.

my kids just discovered Crunchyroll. i don't think i'll need another streaming service for a loooong time.

i'm enjoying normal people even though it doesn't really have much of a story. the lead actors are interesting because they are both good but in different ways. the woman who plays marianne is way more actor-y, while the guy who plays connell is very naturalistic. i've been pretty impressed with that dude in particular.

Remember when Steven Spielberg was like "FUCK Netflix, that shit ain't cinema." and he went on to develop a show for fucking Apple + and a Quibi show that you can only watch at night

— Ben Schouten (@BenGSchout) May 12, 2020

I mean... he didn't make a movie for either one.

true, and tbh good on him for trying new things in his 70s

nothing on Apple+ has been watchable, it's impressive how bland and mushy they made all this content they spent hundreds of millions of dollars on

it’s a very odd proposition. i’ve read every rationalisation going for the existence of apple+, and none of them seem to make any real business sense. as a standalone subscription service, the content isn’t there to justify the cost. as a bundle-in for hardware (1 year included), i don’t see it making any difference to people who were going to buy the hardware anyway.

milo's right, the beastie boys thing had the best clips in the credits and it's what I have enjoyed most

+ makes sense as a sweetener to buy a device for the free entry but it's not very sweet

nothing on Apple+ has been watchable, it's impressive how bland and mushy they made all this content they spent hundreds of millions of dollars on

it’s almost as if you can’t engineer good drama as is it’s a polycarbonate screen

at the very least, it's the cheapest of all the services right now at $50/year

Apple has enough cash to just shut it all down and call it a day, write off the loss whenever they feel like it. but like Quibi it's hard to see... why did they even bother?

quibi is fascinating whichever way you look at it. you’ve got a service which (until this week) has been deliberately locked to mobile phones; you’ve got a free three-month trial which very few people took up; you’ve got katzenberg saying quibi is failing because of the coronavirus (disputable); you’ve got a quibi fan podcast called ‘quibiverse’ being threatened with legal action by quibi for using quibi’s name without permission; you’ve got the same podcast rebranding as ‘streamiverse’ with a new mission statement to take the piss out of quibi five times a week; you’ve got a podcast called ‘streamiversity’, a ‘streamiverse’ fan podcast; and in the midst of that you’ve got quibi itself, which offers content such as:

• a show in which people have a meal fired at them from a cannon, and are then given 30 minutes to replicate that meal
• a show in which architects and interior designers build luxury dog kennels
• a sitcom in which dan harmon’s sex doll comes to life and helps a screenwriter win contracts (mentioned upthread)
• a home renovation show in which the homes were once murder crime scenes
• a show about obscure pasta shapes
• a dance show in which the dance floor jerks around until the dancers fall on their arses
• a feelgood show in which famous people give money to a recipient who then must give half that money to someone else in a heartwarming fashion
• a daily weather show which conveniently gives you the weather for generally the whole of america in just seven minutes

i'm kinda curious which of those you made up

quibi really does feel like a multi-billionaire made a lot of coked up phone calls and then rather than admit he did that, he started a network

otm. i can’t wait to read the book on the failure of quibi, which should be out by august

the netflix doc about it will be great

a two hour special in 17 instalments

i see what you did there

Liiike...I really only got as far as learning that Quibi was a streaming service for smartphones only and said 'wow, that's really fucking stupid' and moved on with my life. Assuming if I thought it was that stupid that it would probably wind up being wildly successful because that's the way the world goes. But reading more about it (thank u AA) it seems like a venture deliberately constructed to fail as catastrophically as possible.

Is it really such a dumb idea to start a service that specializes in professionally produced short form video? They didn't just pull the idea from their ass. I'm sure there's mountains of data about how long people usually watch YouTube, average item view times etc, and they thought - what if we did short form properly, with real formats, rather than a bunch of jackasses challenging each other to eat a hot pepper or something. Where it feels like they fucked it up is that they've commissioned a bunch of absolute toss.

that and the fact that it’s extraordinarily difficult to watch something on your phone even for 7 minutes, because phones are what a lot of us use while we’re watching telly

Anyone start "I Know This Much Is True" on HBO? What a joyless exercise in darkness. Dunno if I'm going to stick with it after the first episode.

Is that the one from Derek Cianfrance?

If so I've got the first episode to watch but haven't got around to it yet

It sounds absurdly grim

That's the Wally Lamb adaptation with Ruffalo playing twins. I read the book in high school I think; I recall it being absurdly grim.

Remember when Steven Spielberg was like "FUCK Netflix, that shit ain't cinema." and he went on to develop a show for fucking Apple + and a Quibi show that you can only watch at night

Spielberg thinks only films released in theatres should be eligible for Oscars, and yet he made a TV SHOW called AMAZING STORIES that won 500 academy awards! I'll wait here until he gives them all back.

i've been chortling over quibi since it was announced. was a little afraid they might find a way to not screw the pooch but all playing out as expected. watching internet pioneer jeffrey katzenberg and entertainment legend meg whitman get clowned by tiktok is already like a billion dollars worth of entertainment

re: i know this much is true, i <3 rufalo but the source is the Most Oprah's Book Club Shit Ever and uh nope