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

After Elvis T talked about Gyeongseong Creature I've burned through it pretty quickly and enjoyed it a lot, but fuck me it's too long - especially the first section of 7 which could easily have wrapped up in 3.

It reminds me of a particularly unsatisfactory RPG adventure where the narrative never moves forward and the tricks you would use as a GM to make sure it does are pretty much exactly what the director does - a character literally trips over a nitrogen cylinder because he hasn't put together that he keeps seeing empty and discarded cylinders everywhere and they have a key part to play.

Absolutely understandable. Kinda how I felt about Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters which seemed like four episodes were burned exclusively on close-up shots about family angst.

Laughing Woman has a Stelvio Cipriani score, can't be a total waste

Tested the new Prime setup by screening all three hours of Babylon (broken in two)...there were only 45 seconds of ads at the beginning: a short Amazon one and a regular ad for Airbnb.

I didn’t know about Freevee until now. Freevee is the name of the TVs installed in every apartment by law in the Running Man.

I think one big reason that streaming ads seem so egregious is that even as more and more shows are filmed and budgeted and paced like movies, commercials have just gotten dumber and more obnoxious and more desperate as they claw for whatever eyeballs they can. You not only end up with really powerful shows/episodes/scenes interrupted by the dumbest shit, it's often the same commercials over and over again, since no one is seriously advertising on these platforms. At least back in the days of peak commercial television the shows were made with commercial breaks in mind. But if streaming is going to do this, then yeah, just stick a few unskippable ads at the beginning.

I don't notice the ads have gotten any more obnoxious, but the repetition of the same few ads really grates

I think commercials on TV are funnier than ever! The ones on streaming are shorter, tho (15-30 secs?), which may hurt… plus, yeah, the repetition.

My bugbear is that all ads nowadays seem to be about "hey, check us out!" but forget the "by the way, this is what we do" part

I guess except the TikTok-styled ads filmed on an iPhone with an actor pretending to be a prole using a product

I think where Prime have fucked up is that when Netflix & Disney introduced ads, they did it via a new, lower priced subscription tier.

Amazon sticking them into the existing tier and making subscribers pay extra for ad.free takes some chutzpah. Their email about it had a reek of desperation about it too, bigging up all the other benefits you get which, apart from the free next day delivery, is pretty unappealing.

the only worthwhile ads are Flo's Progressive ads IMO all others are awful

Haven't seen the flo ads in a long time but the rest of what I see really is terrible.

My dad likes any insurance ad - and EVERY insurance ad. They crack him up. It's true that they're often arresting. It's like insurance companies have settled on absurdity as an industry brand. Inexplicable events, talking lizards.

He'll grab me and say "look, look!" He'll watch it again for the 40th time. In stitches.

Ads suck as much as ever, they might not seem as bad because what I think of as “ad humour” is all over every pos coming out of Hollywood for like the last 2 decades

otm

There’s a Spectrum(?) ad running currently, with a family around a dinner table, that’s as funny than any sketch comedy thing I’ve seen in years.

(The “Expired!” fridge lady is also all-time…)

Prime is yuck now. i've been using it for Reacher and i look around and there is nothing else i want to see. like, nothing. i don't care about wheel of time or LotR and all their other shows look stupid. i remember years ago they would always have some recent movies i would want to see or one zeitgeist-y movie straight out of theaters and their old stuff archive was pretty interesting but now Tubi is all i need for that. feel like they stopped paying as much money for stuff. it all looks B-level. and i feel like they want you to pay for recent movies that would have been free before.

The German action movie 60 Minutes (on Netflix) is pretty good. An MMA fighter is trying to make it across Berlin to his daughter's birthday party (and pick up her cake and a kitten on the way) while being chased by gangsters who are pissed he ran out on a rigged fight. There are fights in a training gym, in a nightclub, in some kind of abandoned warehouse/factory, in the street, inside a parked vehicle, and it's all over in a tight 90 minutes. Recommended.

All films should be a tight 90 minutes. Except ones called '60 Minutes'.

Scott otm, I think if prime is betting on their original series bringing people in it's not a very good bet. They just feel very second tier compared to netflix, and their QC is pretty poor. I mean I will definitely watch rings of power to see if they can pull it together, but the fact that they greenlit that particular show as it currently is and gave it such a huge budget says something about the brain trust over there.

I am about halfway through season 1 of the Afterparty (up through Chelsea’s episode) and am enjoying it very much even though it sometimes gives very strong “We have Only Murders In The Building at home” vibes

i couldn't make it through the first episode of that, it just wasn't funny at all.

At least in the UK, Amazon Prime is still pretty good for cult movie obscurities if you do a bit of digging around - quite a lot of giallo, kung fu, poliziotteschi that's obviously been sourced from Arrow or 88 films so the print quality is generally better than on YouTube etc.

Prime has Deadloch, which was one of the best streaming-only shows I've seen.

Huh akm, I’ve found it to be consistently funny and I’ve enjoyed the tonal shifts between each character’s perspective

On the Prime homepage, they've started mixing the FreeVee film titles in alongside the regular Prime stuff instead of clearly separating them into separate listings (FreeVee Comedies/Dramas/Action etc.).

The fact that our shipping account comes with a free TV channel (??) is just an add-on. There are a few shows I watch (The Boys, LotR), but nothing I'd feel gutted about missing if I ever got rid of it entirely. There is no way I'd spend one extra dollar for this service. I already subscribe to too many others (all of which I watch far more).

My dad loves car racing and I have terrible memories of the tv being hijacked by him for hours on weekends to watch nascar/Grand Prix/etc, I find it intolerably boring to watch. But I’m interested in behind-the-scenes of almost anything, so I’ve been watching the NASCAR: Full Speed doc series and it’s pretty interesting.

I looked up earnings out of curiosity, because I think the pit stop stuff is particularly interesting and was shocked to see pit crew workers average $44k per year, while drivers get a base salary of $112k plus $8-47k per race depending on where they finish. The pit crew’s skills are pretty crucial to winning a race, and it’s a dangerous job, but I guess it’s no surprise that teams making in excess of $100m a year have them on the bottom salary rungs.

All films should be a tight 90 minutes. Except ones called '60 Minutes'.

― organ doner (ledge), Thursday, February 1, 2024 10:36 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I'm a firm believer that 90 mins is the perfect movie length. Anything over 2 hrs gtfo too long.

i like when i'm watching some movie from the 30s and its 70 minutes long. perfect!

Rear Window is 1:52 - there is no reason on Earth for a dumb action or superhero movie to be longer than Rear Window IMO.

i think i wrote that in a metal review once. that slayer's south of heaven was 37 minutes long and unless your album is better than slayer's south of heaven it shouldn't be longer than 37 minutes. but nobody listened to me.

Chuck otm about Deadloch, by the way.

they really pad out the length of TV series too. when i see newer TV shows i sometimes realize how little the plots move on an episode by episode basis, like you wait a year or more for a new season of ten episodes and over the whole season the plot inches forward and goes nowhere. i think i started seeing this in the middle seasons of Game of Thrones, when they started making it up as they went along. i don't know that a single thing happened in seasons 5 and 6.

I tend to feel there's a "too long/not long enough" pocket, a running time "uncanny valley" if you will. Movies that are less than 100 minutes, smooth sailing. Movies that are over, say, 240 minutes and duration is part of the experience? Hunker down with a blanket and enjoy.

But between those two? That's where we have a problem.

there are definite pacing issues. i saw ant man and the wasp quantumania and had to turn it off after what felt like an hour and a half, couldn't even make it to the end, but we were only 40 minutes in. whereas at least for me personally something like The Irishman had just great pacing and rhythm, much slower but not exhausting. same thing w/any random episode of that Boba Fett series vs, idk, Tar or something. isn't a series about the galaxy's illest bounty hunter supposed to fly by?

He only flies when someone hasn't bopped him on the jet pack...

Things can be any length they need to be and it helps to not be shit and ideally be edited by Thelma Schoonmaker is basically how I break it down to an extent

the longer you make your movie the better you need to be imo. lots of current hacks would've been making perfectly fine 75min films in the past but now they all get two and a half hours.

Obv if you're Leone or Tarkovsky or Scorsese, feel free to go wild with the lenght.

Those aren't the first three I'd pick for durational masters, but that battle was lost long ago (looooooonnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnggggggggggggggg ago)

i don't know why I can watch like 6 hours straight of a prestige tv series but a movie longer than 120 minutes feels like an eternity (even watching at home) but that's how it is.

(yes I know it's about pacing etc)

One of my favorite directors is Frederick Wiseman and I can easily sit through multiple hours of institutional meetings but I'm absolutely going to complain when Monarch season 1 is 4 hours of show in a 10 hour package.

I think where Prime have fucked up is that when Netflix & Disney introduced ads, they did it via a new, lower priced subscription tier.

Amazon sticking them into the existing tier and making subscribers pay extra for ad.free takes some chutzpah.

I immediately cancelled my Prime membership as soon as they announced the ads. I wasn't watching it anyway, I realised. The shows that it platfrmed like the Boys, we'd sailed the seas for anyway, so that left me watching reruns of KITH and old cartoons from the 30s.

i don't know why I can watch like 6 hours straight of a prestige tv series but a movie longer than 120 minutes feels like an eternity (even watching at home) but that's how it is.

Oh wow absolute opposite for me, frankly most hourlong dramas are paced so slowly these days that even one episode cam be tough. Never enjoyed binging, always feel weirdly depressed afterwards.

this reminds me I need to cancel my free trial Prime by like 2/15 or something

(yes I know it's about pacing etc)

That's quite the accent on you, but I agree, pissing is the main thing.

i made a thread about masters of the air if any ww2-minded nerds are interested in going on some bombing runs with me

Masters of the Air (Hanks/Spielberg series on Apple+)

I think I said upthread I had started Criminal Record on AppleTV - it has a generic title and looks like just another cop show but it is overall pretty good. Five episodes in now. About a cop who has discovered deep-running corruption. So far they are doing a good job of toying with the nature of the corruption--possibly the antagonist straight up committed the murder being covered up, or maybe he's just covering it up, or maybe he has some weird network of undercover agents and is actually a good guy? My only major complaint is the leading actress is in a biracial marriage and yet every conversation she has with her husband, she is gobsmacked by his blind privilege/unconscious racism. How on earth did they get so deep into their relationship without this being an issue sooner? Seems like a big red flag for a marriage.

The pilot for Mr and Mrs Smith ,the new thing with Donald Glover and Maya Erskine, was very watchable but rather inert and by-the-numbers. Maybe the rest of the season gets better/weirder.