What I watched: Continuing our tour of sparsely populated areas featuring UK police dramas, we move on to Shetland, set in the Shetland Isles. Based upon the books by Ann Cleeves, there are five seasons to it, with a six in current production. Each season has an over-arching plot with additional interrelated crimes; and while you can tell who some of the bad guys are there are still surprises at the end. The show has complex relationships, subtle humor, and beautiful, desolate scenery with picturesque towns. Also, the accents are ear candy. I recommend giving it a try. Here is the intro, followed by a clip from season three:
What I read: I read the five books in Tilly Wallace’s delightful Manners and Monsters series. (They are easy reads, you can inhale one in an evening or two; you can grab the first three as a collection for $7.99.) Set in Regency England, the plots swirl around magic, monsters, reanimated dead, mages, hell hounds, and of course, appropriate social conduct. If you like these, there is a crossover series, Highland Wolves, about a Scottish military regiment comprised of wolf shifters. If you are planning a vacation or travel, these books would be a good choice.
What I listened to this week: Lost Day, Other Lives; Slut, For The Soul There Is No Hospital; and Miley Cyrus, WTF Do I Know:
So, dearest DeadSplinterites, are you hanging in there? Feeling alright? Ready for the weekend? What have you watched, read, or listened to? Please drop by, darling ones, and keep us all up to date!
Watched: Willy’s Wonderland starring a muted Nic Cage. He literally doesn’t say a word the whole film but that doesn’t stop him from bringing his A game. It feels like it was purposely designed to be a cult classic and I’m not mad at it. Only Nic Cage can turn cleaning up a derelict party room into a kickass horror/action film.
@HammerZeitgeist are you a Nic Cage fan? What do you think is his best film?
I am a fan! But not one who can meaningfully debate about the hierarchy of his films. I’ve watched almost all his films but barely remember most of them. Though wide in range, they kind of blend together. He’s guaranteed to entertain, whether the film itself is a dumpster fire or snooze fest. What I’m trying to say is that I watch his films for him and can’t be objective because my criteria is “Did Nic give it his 100% or 500%?” Willy’s Wonderland falling in the 450-500% range.
Oh, Shetland! In theory I like it, I just fall asleep every time.
Was enjoying The Sleepwalkers but shit just got rapey. The protagonist of the second book, The Anarchist, is 30 yrs old and he forces himself on an elderly widow, we are constantly reminded that she is older, she is fucking 36 years old. I know it is set in 1903 but WTF.
I watched a 1982 remake of The Scarlet Pimpernel that was campy as fuck. Very disconcerting to laugh whilst people are being guillotined but young Ian McKellen!!
I watched baseball. NYY turned a triple play last night and won in a walk-off. Earlier in the week Corey Kluber pitched a no-hitter. Kind of makes up for the downslide of a couple of weeks ago but listening to Michael Kay is still maddening.
@Sedevilc I have a friend who is a huge baseball fan. She and her husband listen to the games on the radio, and he keeps track of the scoring and action in a notebook. They spend time in Mexico and Argentina and go to local leagues while there. Apparently she can say “hey batter batter” and several other more insulting comments in multiple languages.
read : nothing..im illiterate….books make me itchy
and on the note of itchy….
watched
its fun!…little teeny tiny bit brutal and gorey tho
also watched
it was dissapointing…some really cool art directions…. but every episode is too short to really make a point….and every story has already been told… that said if you want something pretty to look at…or even something that pretends to have substance for yous to chat about at the watercooler at work
its nay bad….first season was better
also also watched
switch off brain…grab popcorn
dis good dumb fun.
huh….i completely forgot about listened too
but considering how much ive been spamming the place this week i guess thats fair enough
…ichi the killer
…that right there is a truly british quantity of understatement…a friend persuaded me to go see that flick on a big screen years ago…& without getting onto unpleasant/spoiler levels of detail…the bit with the oil alone seemed, to quote the friend in question, “a bit much”
…the karl urban dread movie, though…I even forgave it for ripping off the raid…completely over the top…but in a good way…more guns than the raid, too…which another friend once described as “a bit stabby”?
dredd goes in my pile of bestest popcorn flicks
right next to shoot em up and crank
anyways
fuck you chev chellios!
…crank was entirely more fun than it had any business being…& I thoroughly enjoyed shoot ’em up, too
…so can’t say as I’d argue there
@SplinterRIP oh thank goodness…I thought I was being a total wimp. But oh my the Ichi trailer clip looked quite scary.
Dredd was a decent action movie (agreed with SplinerRIP that some of the violence was over the top… am I an old now?)
It was the best a comic book like Judge Dredd was going to get.
Lena Headly was scary good as MaMa.
also also also watched
glorious violence!
anyways spoilers ahead if you feel so inclined
…iirc oldboy is the middle one of a trilogy…the first being sympathy for mr vengeance & the third being lady vengeance…it is excellent if you have a tolerance for the violence thing, though…& that corridor sequence spawned a thousand knockoffs
…if you liked it you might also like that lady snowblood film I think I mentioned when trying not to go on about kill bill one time…or the lone wolf & cub movies…again iirc the first two of those were spliced together into a movie called shogun assassin…which, for those keeping score is where GZA plundered a bunch of the samples that he used to stitch together the liquid swords album…which is also something I have kind of a soft spot for
…the first 1min20 or so of that gives you a pretty solid idea of the plot of the movie…& if I’ve done it right clicking through ought to take you to the rest of the album as a playlist on youtube
…for that matter if you can find them the lone wolf & cub thing is an excellent run of manga/comics
I’ve been binging the show Word of Honor on Prime. It’s a Chinese martial arts/gay romance drama (a genre I never knew I needed) and oh man I love it. I’m a couple of episodes from the end of season 2 and SHIT IS HAPPENING. I mean, the cast of characters is huge and I feel like it’s taken me until now to have some grasp on what the hell has been happening, with lots of secrets and lies, and people plotting, and betrayals… It’s like a foreign period fantasy soap opera with fun fight scenes and I highly recommend it.
Oh! And I discovered some interesting drama about the show too. I noticed sometimes the lines were over-dubbed (the show is in the original Mandarin, subtitled, so it’s jarring when the words being said clearly don’t line up with the actors’ mouths), so I started googling and it’s because the original lines were much gayer. So I guess they toned it down. Still, it’s pretty hard to read the primary relationship in the show as the “friendship” I guess they’re marketing it as. I guess if they’re just the sort of friends that fall in “friendship” at first sight, make lots of suggestive jokes, talk about spending the rest of their lives together, and call each other soulmates… But they never kiss so clearly it must be platonic. 😂
Apparently there’s a whole genre called Boy Love which is thinly veiled gay romance, and it has tons of codes. Like when one of the main characters cuts off part of the other’s sleeve, the words for “cut sleeve” sound like “boy love” in Mandarin.
@BigDamnHeroes, thank you for sharing the additional research on the show. It made it sound even more interesting.
Also watched: Things Heard and Seen starring Amanda Siegfried. Not a terrible contribution to the haunted house in a small town genre. While there are ghosts, it was more of a psychological thriller than a horror film… and “thriller” is an overstatement.
@Farscythe Ichi the killer would give me nightmares; even the trailer was “hide your eyes” violent. Well, at least no dogs were killed. That’s where I draw the line.
no dogs were harmed in the making of ichi
theres some bits you cant fucking unsee tho….
anyways….you and i share the same line 🙂
Ugh speaking of drawing a line at animal abuse, my husband has been playing wolfenstein games and they’re brutal. One of them has flashbacks to the main character and his dog getting abused by his dad and I had to leave the room.
@BigDamnHeroes apparently there is a website that one can search for instances of animal abuse or death within films, for the purpose of avoiding them. I do not “watch” media for education or trauma or drama; I just want to be lightly entertained.
…I believe this is what you were thinking of about a website that warns you off things you might not want to watch…although they’ve got quite a lot of categories these days so it can be worth checking who listed something & for what since some things seem to have more reasons than others to deserve their listings…at least last time I had reason to look at it for someone?
https://www.doesthedogdie.com/
im still in mourning for dogmeat….from fallout 2
he was a good boy
bestest damn dog ive ever witnessed getting shot with a gatling gun
…..
ill tell you what!
Dogmeat was a very good boy.
I’m watching Underground Railroad on Prime. I read the book when it came out and I’m just as impressed with the series as I was with it. Note to people who haven’t read the novel, this is alt history, don’t expect historical accuracy. It’s very imaginative and beautifully done. There is, as you might imagine, very graphic violence against enslaved people.
I’m listening to the podcast Do You Know Mordechai. It raises some interesting questions about consent, and where the line is between little lies designed to impress perspective partners and criminal fraud.
I’m also still listening to Superwolves, not a day goes by that I don’t listen to the full lp. Sometimes more than once. I’ve been trying not to flood the DUAN or SMBD with my obsession but I can already tell this will be my favorite record of 2021. Will Oldham’s voice has never sounded better. But don’t be fooled by Matt Sweeney’s gorgeous melodies, this is dark stuff, mostly about anger and death. Oldham lost his mother to Alzheimer’s and had his first child in the last couple of years so mortality is on his mind.
Good To My Girls
I fear the fact that after life, complete emptiness whirls
And we only have our share of life, so I am good to my girls
I am good to my girls
@Hannibal you converted me to that album last week and I thank you. This quote from your podcast “where the line is between little lies designed to impress perspective partners and criminal fraud” huh, is it about a GOP dating website? Swipe far right?
You might want to check out Superwolf, the record the did together 15 years ago, also very good. I wholeheartedly recommend all Bonnie “Prince” Billy and am excited to have made a convert!
Mordechai is In Canada, it’s sad to see the liars and conmen are everywhere.
I love Shetland – it’s my fave Brit cop show. I watched Hitler’s Circle of Evil after Hannibal recommended – it felt more like a horror story since there are so many parallels to today. It was pinging very hard on my existential dread monitor.
@Lymond the existential dread level is quite high for me these days, too. The Perez dude from Shetland was tweeting that they were filming seasons 6 and 7 right now, back-to-back.
That’s great @Elliecoo – I actually can’t wait.
@Lymond it’s amazing to me that so many Boomers, whose fathers fought in WW2 are buying into the fascist GOP.
It’s amazing how quickly history fades. I guess that’s why we repeat the bad stuff over and over.
There’s book called Once An Eagle by Anton Myrer. It is the story of the kind of person who you want to lead you and the real life shithead you end up working for/resenting the fuck out of/suffer or dead because of his ambitions. I’ve worked for a Courtney Massengale type and suffered for it (nearly ended up fired actually.) My only revenge was enjoy seeing him exposed as the weak fragile shithead he was.
For a lot of Vietnam Vets, the book became a touchstone of sorts.
It was made into a miniseries by NBC in the 1970s starring Sam Elliot as Sam Damon. Someone posted the nine hour miniseries on youtube and I watched it this past week. For a 70s miniseries, it (for me) surprisingly hits a lot of very adult topics that go beyond what was “acceptable” in that time frame.
The video and sound quality is garbage (hey, someone pulled it off their old Betamax tapes) but the story is good. Not many large battle scenes as they probably didn’t have the budget. Also it is bit change from the book as no one wanted to deal with Vietnam at that point.
Lots of good actors in the miniseries that you might not expect.
@ManchuCandidate, anything Vietnam adjacent will resonate with me, as I was a small child watching it on the nightly news, and lost relatives to that pointless war.
Watched: Honest Thief on Prime. I watched it because I needed something to occupy my time while I was getting my tires switched over today and the reviews were excellent. The reviews were wrong. The movie had, quite possibly, the dumbest premise I’ve ever seen and just got worse from there. Don’t bother.
Read: I was finishing up a book that I’ll profile next week when I do Brain Drain. But I just checked Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke from the library today so I’ll get started on that one this week.
Listened: Spent some time listening to the late, great Doyle Bramhall Sr. He co-wrote a number of SRV’s hits and was an excellent musician in his own right.
@butcherbakertoiletrymaker I always appreciate a “don’t bother”; it saves time, eh? Looking forward to this week’s gardening Dirty Business in 8 minutes!
I haven’t read Rendezvous with Rama in many years but I liked it a lot. Curious what you’ll think of it.
I finally FINALLY finished “Seveneves” by Neal Stephenson. It’s almost 900 pages and I started it April 2. It’s a slog. There are interesting bits, but it mostly feels like you’re reading an engineering manual, or studying to get into NASA. This book should have been half as long. Everything has a fucking category. 75% is boring, pointless information. I did a lot of skimming when I could tell he was going to get into a big discussion about thrusters and orbital velocity. The ending isn’t even satisfying. I felt like I was studying for a vocab test.