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

For All Mankind didn't have a very interesting take on speculative fiction, the Soviets should have built colonies on the moon or something.

Agree re Morning Show and Mythic Quest.

We started watching that Stephen King one last night with Clive Owen in it, watched literally 5 mins and turned it off, it was weird and morose.

...Liseys Story. It gets less than 6 on IMDB lol so we werent alone.

Just tried the first episode of The Knick on HBO Max (speaking of Clive Owen). Didn't make it to the end. Had prestige stink all over it, wallowing in gratuitous gore and squalor, and frankly I was bored.

I liked the first season ok but never bothered after that

I liked the Knick! But yeah I have only seen one season, just forgot to watch it, maybe got bored after Clivey started with his speed habit thing.

Kinda stuck on liseys story even though I don’t think it’s very good. And I love Clive, children of men is a top 5 movie for me, but his American “accent” in this is pretty questionable.

The thing with FAM for me is that I know so little about the space race that a lot of I catch myself wondering if all the developments have basis in reality or if it's the show making things up.

certain recurring characters are real, like Deke Slayton the head office guy (aka Frank Sbotka from the Wire) , Werner Von Braun, Thomas Paine the administrator

Deke was irl on the ground at Houston for Apollo 11 riding comms with Armstrong, Baldwin & Collins. he was a big part of the apollo missions & one of the original Mercury astronauts

two main Apollo 10 astronauts Baldwin & Gordo are fake - but stuff like their bar hangout is real

thats what is great for me as a space nerd, is it is very grounded in the reality of those times but just sets off on this new thought experiment within the same reality

even the wives & the way they look out for each other, the lead astronauts wife is the Head of Wives etc, that is all very legit

how similar is 'for all mankind' in tone to 'the right stuff,' also known as the best movie ever?

it’s of a piece, for sure

distant neighbors, long lost cousins perhaps?

oh AND they bring in some great stuff later with the Mercury 13, the irl women astronaut program

For All Mankind didn't have a very interesting take on speculative fiction, the Soviets should have built colonies on the moon or something.

This seems a weird complaint to make about a show which features the Soviets building colonies on the moon.

Do they? My bad, I found it pretty dull so I was probably only half watching. I do remember the giant rocket launching from the ocean at the end, though.

yeah there was a literal space war on the moon with people shooting people and shit on both sides lol.

Well ok not *quite*, but still.

I tried the This Is Pop on the Brill Building and it felt like a total mess: the "in four songs" billing only very vaguely lived up to (they don't even explain what the Archies were), so much time spent on silly reconstructions. The focus on not exactly top shelf talents like Neil Sedaka and Andy Kim, which I guess you could spin as giving less critically lauded writers their due tho cynically I'd also say they probably couldn't get Carole King or Neil Diamond; at any rate if you're gonna go that way I'd have prefered full eps on them, this way it's just a weird mishmash that assumes you know a lot already. Linda Perry being a rockist bore. Are the other episodes like this too?

oops I guess that's netflix sorry

I’ve been meaning to check that out, too bad to hear it’s a mess…

I've seen 4:

Boyz II Men was a topic I knew nothing about and didn't feel like I knew much more afterwards.

Autotune I really enjoyed, but would probably have preferred a doc with the guy who invented it more than T-Pain's wife's view on his career.

Swedish Pop was fine but probably in the same vein as you say the Brill Building one was.

Pop Country shies away from all the big topics and should have been probing why Taylor Swift abandoned country or Carrie Underwood went back to it. The nub of a good idea around "authenticity" not pursued enough.

We just watched the Britpop episode—it was somewhat superficial (with some questionable framing), but enjoyable/entertaining. Lots of good interviews.

i liked the swedish one but tbf i only watched it because it had jay mccarrol of nirvanna the band the show as the lead and honestly if you haven't, all of you should just find a way to watch nirvanna the band the show (given the context i feel like i should say it has nothing to do with curt kobain btw)

The Brill ep has some interesting stuff, but it’s also kind of a mess.

I had the panicky 'don't know what to watch' thing on Sunday (with a hangover) and stuck Black Summer on. I made it through 4 episodes and jesus, it was awful. Zero budget (driving around an endless suburb, looking for a stadium that appears to be like Kafka's castle), rubbish grumpy zombies that can't smash windows, dreadful script and acting.

I quite like me some low-budget zombie/horror action too. Is there anything better than this on streaming at the moment?

Black Summer is so much better than overwrought nonsense like The Walking Dead. That said, I've watched more of the new season and I think they went too high on the level of nonlinearity and narrative challenge. There are moments where I enjoy it as an exercise in vibe and others where I'm like "this is a TV show and I would like it if I knew who the people on the screen were and what they're trying to do," which in S1 I always did.

Agreed that the Walking Dead is overwrought but it does deliver - set pieces, some proper jaw-dropping horror in places. Black Summer just seemed to not be doing anything particularly well but you've made it sound like I should persevere. I'll give it a couple more episodes, cheers.

Any good horror(-y) series to recommend to my mom? Big fan of the X-Files, Stephen King in general, she liked the House on Haunted Hill series up to the very end.

Channel Zero looks like an option but I'd have to subscribe to Shudder for her.

Fringe! Started out as an X-Files clone, but turns into its own, beautiful, weird thing by the end of the first season.

hannibal

the outsider
the strain
evil
american horror story maybe?
new creepshow reboot is pretty good too

The new Steven Soderbergh movie on HBO Max is...not good. The script is a convoluted mess, and it looks like he shot a 1950s mystery on an iPhone. Some of the performances are very good, though. Don Cheadle, Bill Duke, and (surprise!) Matt Damon are all solid.

we have spoiler tags now btw

the iphone does not have super-wide anamorphic lenses btw. the first time there was a long pan with the edge of field distorting, I wondered if it was a covid-specific choice designed to make the actors look closer together - and the limited set dressing in subsequent scenes sharpened this suspicion: reducing the amount of jobs requiring ppl in the same space - but the more it became clear how little each of the primary characters knew what was going on, I figured it was instead, or also, a deliberate disorienting tactic.

a convoluted mess

by the last 20-30 minutes, the twists and every-reveal-creates-another-mystery had me giving up on trying to invest in hoping any particular character made it out at the end, but that just enhanced the way that each character pretty much does have their involvement in the plot resolved. and the reveal of the macguffin paid off super-hard for me.

You can buy anamorphic lenses for the iPhone.
https://moondoglabs.com/

yeah Sean Baker used a clip-on for Tangerine iirc. but that and the two Soderbergh iPhone movies also don't look like they were shot on a real camera, which this does.

Some of the Channel Zeros were completely excellent. Esp the one with John Carroll Lynch. Was thinking about it recently because the new king thing on Apple, Liseys Story, is like a really bad version of Channel Zero but with really famous actors.

Questlove’s doc “Summer Of Soul” is up on Hulu - about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, unseen footage til now

it’s SO great, every performance is a knockout

Watched a few more of those pop docs (Sweden, festivals, Auto-Tune)… they’re all done by the same producers, but have entirely different styles and approaches for some reason. The Auto-Tune one is genuinely good, I recommend it.

nobody told me Mr In-Between was back on, that show is fuckin great

It is! I always wonder how americans deal with it, it is so dryly australian.

The latest ep with the road trip was strange and very subtle. But I can see it leading up to something ugly like the socks ep in last season.

Questlove’s doc “Summer Of Soul” is up on Hulu - about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, unseen footage til now

it’s SO great, every performance is a knockout

― terminators of endearment (VegemiteGrrl), Friday, July 2, 2021 1:24 AM

A hard second on this. Lost track of the number of times my jaw dropped or I said "wow" aloud while watching. Powerful shit.

xp, yeah i wouldn't want to be in the drug mule's seat. any civilian who gets near ray gets capsized by the wake.

OK, I loved the Magician movie and had no idea they’d spun a TV series out of it. Getting hold of Mr In-Between immediately.

HBO cancelled Lovecraft Country? WTF

Thanks for reminding me that Mr InBetween was based on a film, finally went back and watched it. It's recommended for fans of the show for sure though don't expect too much more than the first draft of what the expanded program is (there are direct script and scenario lifts) and a chuckle from baby Ray's babyface. Still great though!

I had a go at the BBC's "All That Glitters" which is a jewelry maker competition in the mold of (and maybe from the same producers as?) Great Pottery Throwdown. The work is good, the contestants are interesting but the host, Katherine Ryan, is probably the worst reality show host I've ever seen: no particular interest or connection with jewelry, horrible vocal fry, no sense of humor, terrible timing and delivery that makes QVC announcers sound like orson welles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4paWOf1t5Q

I like what they're doing but I honestly don't know if I can handle watching a second episode because of this very terrible host.

Just started watching Mr. InBetween and I'm into it.

I'm glad Lovecraft Country got spiked; that was one of the biggest disappointments of the year for me (loved the book, but they fumbled a lot of the stuff they adapted directly, and everything they came up with themselves — Korean fox-girl — suuuuucked).

I do remember the giant rocket launching from the ocean at the end, though.

Based on a real proposal that was never built:
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/sea-dragon-is-the-biggest-rocket-we-ever-dreamed-of

I liked the new soderbergh fine, it’s a decent heist film with some good performances — cheadle is really good — and costumes/sets, though it does feel a little empty and rushed

Questlove’s doc “Summer Of Soul” is up on Hulu - about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, unseen footage til now

it’s SO great, every performance is a knockout

I have just been getting into Questlove's podcast (Questlove Supreme) in the past couple weeks. Listening to him interview everybody from Jimmy Jam to Weird Al Yankovic has been really educational. And so, not knowing about the movie (which I guess he has promoted on social media, but not on the cast), I had heard enough of these that I was like "let's go to Netflix and Hulu and find some Black music documentaries." And when I opened up Hulu on my phone, just staring me in the face was Summer of Soul by Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson.

So amazing and moving. The one thing I keep thinking after that is, we get one or two blockbuster performances from each of the artists - can you imagine how much amazing material from this festival they didn't include?

I have to imagine there will more comprehensive releases of these concerts. It's kind of mindblowing that the footage and audio is so immaculate.