I just saw the season finale of Industry and all I can say is wow!!! I actually gasped out loud a few times. What a stellar season!
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I just finished watching the 2nd season of Colin From Accounts on Paramount Plus. It is pretty funny and very cringey at times. The main couple are married in real life.
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Ooh! Thanks for the reminder. We enjoyed the first season, but blanked on the existence of the second!
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The second season is even better than the first season.
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Lol. Well, well, well… I admit liking it!! It’s just perfectly light entertainment. Whenever new episodes come out, I’ll watch them right away. It’s like a tame Sex and the City, both by Darren Star, but as such reflecting current more demure times. And yes, it’s paint by numbers sometimes. But it’s like a Maroon 5 hit song: not something you would necessarily love with your heart, but perfectly crafted and can sing along to in the car.
It’s all good, man. As I’ve said many times before, in many different ways: taste and preferences for literally anything and everything are highly personal. Imagine if we all loved and hated the exact same things? What a dull existence that would be.
What makes life interesting & fun is the plurality and diversity of opinions about music, art, literature, food.
FWIW, our dear HK buddy highly recommended Emily in Paris to us. We had low expectations, and what little we watched fell short. Your comparison to a tamer Sex in the City kinda hits it on the head for me, bc what made that show interesting was how audacious and edgy (for the time) it was… even tho the first time I saw an epi of SATT I didn’t think I could watch more of that, either: all that privilege and money and shoes — but of course it was about so much more than that.
I will trust our buddy on his opinions about Chinese food & philosophy, but our tastes in shows, music, and many other things are very, very different. And that’s ok.
They’re not superior or inferior, they’re just different.
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Interesting read.
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We actually watched all of Younger hahaha. I think I may be more of a David E. Kelley person — like Picket Fences, Big Little Lies, Goliath, The Undoing, Ally McBeal.
90210 was before my time, but my PIC would watch Melrose Place with his ex & friends. It was a thing 
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Eli, it was outstanding. As finale go, amazing. I may watch the entire show over again. What writing!
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The first two episodes of Nobody Wants This. Really, really not very good. I may hate-watch a few more episodes to see if it finds its footing, but I am not hopeful.
Yup. And yet, we finished it. Be ready for a second season.
Or not.
I bought NEW ‘74 (last year) Zambezi green KG convertible, beige top, automatic shift. Had it about 25 years, hated to let it go. One bad thing, HUGE blind spot so I was very reluctant to let anyone else drive it. Also, hard to enjoy a convertible in SF!
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I learned to drive on the hilly streets of San Francisco in a VW bug. Not for the faint-hearted, but I was often complimented on my clutch work! My father actually did an excellent job teaching me. 
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Oops! On second thought I’d shared that picture often enough for a food forum.
@Lectroid I gotsta know… have you seen this, and what did you think?
In a Violent Nature (2024) - dir. Chris Nash
One of the hallmarks of slasher movies is the “killer’s point of view” camera. As the audience, we are placed inside the killer at crucial moments, so we still have an excellent view of the violence, but are still deprived, as audience members, of knowledge of the killer’s identity.
The thing is, these moments are occasional. We switch to that POV shot only for key scenes, or even isolated moments in those scenes. The rest of the film is shot traditionally, with an omnipresent camera showing the audience disparate viewpoints, allowing for plot developments, exposition, character building, etc. All the standard elements of film, delivered in standard ways.
What if you reversed that proportion? What if the baseline of the film was the silent killer’s POV? What if you only broke into the ‘traditional’ omnipresent view very rarely, and only when you couldn’t give the audience necessary information any other way?
What if you actually had to walk with Jason/Michael Myers down the street and through the woods and wait for 3 minutes outside the cabin door for someone to inevitably decide to check out the noise, alone…
That’s what’s happening here. This is a slasher where the only real POV you get is the killer. The plot and characters, then, are quick little sketches. Story beats and character types are implied, suggested by quick little lines, like the 5 second gesture drawings of a still life artist. It’s drawing a chair by drawing everything in the room that ISN’T the chair, so you can see its shape clearly, even though the thing itself is missing.
It’s a neat little trick. The camerawork and editing chops (and sound design!!) required to pull this off are really astonishing, in that way where something truly masterful renders itself invisible. The tricks aren’t flashy. Just so well done you don’t register them as tricks. And, as @linguafood said, the gore and creative kills are absolutely there.
I thought this was a really clever and fun filmmaking experiment. But I can see where someone who isn’t as interested in the technical aspects of the film might find it a bit slow. My partner felt more that way about it, though she did note that the gore effects were very well done. I heartily recommend it if you like this sort of thing. However, if coming up with creative uses for a log splitter are not your cup of blood and bone fragments, this probably won’t be, either.
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I also thought it was really tense in between the killings. The ending in particular, where I kept expecting him to come out of the woods and get the girl and the woman after all, or that the woman was somehow connected to him. Those were some of the tensest minutes at the end of a movie for me. Phew!
The Substance (2024) - dir. Coralie Fargeat
“What the ever-living-FUCK did I just watch?” is almost certainly going to be your reaction coming out of this film. Truly, the less I tell you about this, the better. If you have seen the teasers or trailers and you think this movie is at ALL something you would enjoy, then I urge you to stop reading and just go see it. See it in a theater with a crowd of other people so you can look around afterwards at the open mouths and shell shocked expressions of your fellow theater goers as confirmation that, yes, you did just see what you think you saw.
But if you want at least a little knowledge–
This is less a story with characters and a plot than it is a modern fable. Its inhabitants aren’t fully human characters, they are archetypes, universal stand-ins for particular concepts. The dialogue they speak in no way resembles a thing one actual person would say to another. Rather, every line is a signifier, a declaration of principles or a moral proclamation. Things are distorted to the point of caricature, intentionally so. So be prepared for that.
Visually, Fargeat and her cinematographer and production designer are aiming VERY high, and with a surprising amount of success. Explicit calls to Kubrick (The long, color saturated hallways and Shining-esque carpet patterns), Lynch (unsettling closeups), Gilliam (a large portion of the film is shot through super-wide fisheye lenses, turning the the sets, and bodies inhabiting them, into funhouse distortions), and most of all, early David Cronenberg body horror. I cannot emphasize that last one enough. This film is about bodies, how we view them, what we demand of them, the standards we hold about them, and the truly unsettling things we are willing to do to them to uphold these ‘ideals’.
If you want a quick plot summary, I can give you one: Demi Moore plays Elizabeth Sparkle, a former ingenue now on the wrong side of 50, reduced to doing cheesecake 80’s-style workout videos where she plasticly smiles her way through telling her viewers to “Pump it up!” Dennis Quaid is her absolute sleazeball of a boss, a consumate chauvanist and vulgarian. When Elizabeth is unceremoniously dumped for being too old, she succumbs to the temptations of The Substance, which will create a newer, better version of herself. The only catch, she must trade off every seven days without fail, flipping her consciousness from old, current Elizabeth to the new, young, perky “Sue” (Marget Qualley). Naturally, rules are not followed, and truly horrific hilarity ensues.
For once, I don’t mean “hilarity ensues” ironically. The third act of the film will absolutely prove divisive. The film, depending on your feelings on the matter, either “descends” or “transcends” into grande guinol camp. I thought it was a fantastic moment. Others have said that was the point where the film lost them. Either way, it’s something to experience. I will be unsurprised if Moore gets an Oscar nom for her work. It’s absolutely raw and impossible to look away from.
This film is weird. Like, Yorgos Lanthimos at his most misanthropic. I can see a lot of people going in unprepared walking out. But I’m pretty sure I won’t see anything this exciting or new the rest of the year. This is a film that just went for it so hard that whether you end up liking the result or not (and to be very clear, I LOVED it), you have to feel a deep respect for its audacity and commitment.
Bra-FUCKING-vo!!!
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Advanced copy of Demi Moore’s, The Substance. Started off fine but the last 40 mins were a deep dive into ridiculous gore. Ruined a decent premise.
I wrote that a few weeks back and days later changed my opinion to: SKIP IT! Especially after the cheerful spin D Moore put on the flick during every press convo.
Horrible.
