Hi friends! What are some tv shows or movies which you feel are under-appreciated? Things people may have never watched and should consider checking out?
One of my faves is the movie Grosse Pointe Blank. John Cusack plays a contract killer who goes home for his high school reunion. Dan Aykroid is a rival contract killer and they’re both after the same mark. Meanwhile, Cusack reunites with the girlfriend he abandoned on prom night.
Hijinks ensue. Shootouts happen. Fantastic soundtrack. Joan Cusack’s scene of taking down the office is one for the ages.
Hey all – I had this scheduled for 19:00 today since I had dinner at the parents’ house. I didn’t see it when I opened the page when I got home. I opened it from the dashboard, made no changes, and then hit “update” and now I see it.
Did anyone see this earlier tonight? I am so confused….
Love that movie. “You’re a handsome devil. What’s your name?”
The movie that seemed to come and go in the collective memory of the world is Legends of the Fall. It’s long, which is probably why it didn’t do as well as it could have, but it is an excellent film and the music score is incredible.
Legends of the Fall is so fucking depressing, though!
Seriously. I wanted out at the same time Julia Ormond did.
I liked Grosse Point Blank and Legends of the Fall. It’s been some time since I’ve seen either one.
I had a four hour phone call with a friend today. Four…hours…, I’m talked out. Goodnight Deadsplinter!
I loved Grosse Pointe Blank. I had it on VHS and never found it on DVD so I haven’t seen it in years. “You can’t go home again… but you can shop there.”
Currently watching Sabrina the Teenage Witch on Hulu. We had gotten the whole series on DVD when the kids were little and they watched it ad nauseam, so now it’s little more than background noise for me, like Stargate SG1.
I’m in the middle of The Dig which just popped up on Netflix. It’s hard for me to imagine anyone liking it unless they cared about archaeology, but I’m enjoying it.
It’s a fictionalized version of the discovery of an Anglo Saxon burial site. Ralph Fiennes plays the lead excavator and Carey Mulligan is the landowner. He digs, things gradually appear, she watches over it all.
It’s about as fast paced as a guy hand digging a trench, but I find these kinds of stories very interesting.
I’ve hand-dug trenches, although not in Europe. Do not recommend.
Enjoyed GPB. It had some really well choreographed fights that felt more real than the typical movie fight.
For me, it’s Babylon 5. Where DS9 gets celebrated, B5 gets ignored but it did things much better than DS9 in many aspects (the running joke on the B5 set was that week’s DS9 ep basically borrowed B5’s plot from the week before -some say tomato, some say borrowed.) Sure the SFX are dated (especially the S1 CGI which was made with an Amiga) but the story still feels strong.
I also feel it was the precursor to the Expanse as it gets caught up in the politics/mess of humanity/alienity (cough) while trying to tell a personal story. In some things it feels like the mid90s show it was and yes, it didn’t always have the best acting but they did a lot with the limited budget compared to DS9’s budget.
It originated the TV story arc of telling a story over the season than standalone episodes that later folks like JJ Abrams would use to beat over the head of people in LOST and Ron Moore did with the BSG reboot, but unlike both of those shows it didn’t write itself into a corner (originator J. Michael Strazynski wrote the majority of the episodes) and had a good idea where the ending would happen even when the actor who played the main character of S1 had to leave due to mental illness.
The 5th season was weak/crap, but it was more due to the fact that the producers were told they were going to be cancelled in S4 so they crammed in everything they wanted to do in S5 into S4. Also J. Michael Strazynski was burning out writing 20+ episodes a season which you could see a fall off in the quality.
Show won 2 Hugos and a host of awards over it’s DS9 “rival.” At least before the Hugos were corrupted by RW trolls.
Despite what fictional Sheldon fucking Cooper claims, B5 bested its Trek contemporaries/rivals.
southland tales
its a wonderful trainwreck
Three favorites of mine are ALL terrible in…probably many ways. But I DO love all of them, and they all make me laugh;
Encino Man–Brendan Fraser before he became “Leading Man” material, acting alongside Pauly Shore and Sean Astin.
Idiocracy–i KNOW, lots of folks have issues with this one, because *all* they see is “Eugenics!!!”.
Now, while I WILL agree that YES, it can be seen that way–if Eugenics is ALL you choose to get out of the movie–and NOT, say, the terrible things which can happen to society if we give up and let the dumbest segments of our society drag everyone downward, rather than educating folks, and lifting people UP, you’ve taken the wrong message from it…
Idiocracy was supposed to be a dystopian farce… showing the worst of what’s possible, if we allow our society to be dumbed-down to entertain the masses, allow corporations to control *everything* and don’t educate kids.
Instead, it’s practically become a scarily prescient preface to the Trump Cult, the republican breaking of education, the commodification of modern life, and the willful embrace of ignorance on the right and far left (where the ends of the “horseshoe” basically turn things into a circle….
All the Hatch Act violations during 45’s reign echo “Carls Junior!, ” Starbucks, & Brawndo controlling basically everything in the movie, and the parallels with today’s lack of understanding of what the Nazis did, with the line from the narration on the Time Machine at the end of the movie’s “The Un un-Nazied the World” is sadly… accurate🙃
I love and sometimes hate this movie–love for the farce, and hate, for how disturbingly accurate it’s really become, in the last few years.😕
My last fave is Dogma.
As someone who grew up Catholic, this movie will ALWAYS be a favorite. Alllllll the tiny little in-jokes–like the “let us all rise for the recession of faith” and the cardinals driver being blessed–and therefore “a weapon of God’s” are just hilarious😉
There are just *so many* little things to love about that movie–from the whitewashing of Jesus & his disciples,to Mary *not* being a Virginia after Jesus was born (he HAD brothers & sisters, according to the “non-catholic” Bible versions!😉😂), the hypocrisy of the Cardinal, Azreal, Loki, Bartley, the Golgothan, Metatron, and God being Alanis….. it’s just a HOOT, all the way through😁
Mostly because of all the layers… and the things which are “wrong,” but that which most of the critics of the movie and it’s “wrongness” also don’t seem to see, can be *also* read as commentary on the supposed “infallibility of the Holy Mother Church” or the infallibility of the current Pope.
As someone who adored church (the idea of it) as a child, and who left after confirmation, when we were declared “adults” with the ability to determine our own minds–at the ripe old age of thirteen(😉😂🤣), and who couldn’t STAND the hypocrisy i saw from our local priest–the guy who praised certain folks in our parish for being there “every Sunday**” while villifying others… Dogma will forever be a favorite.
I get that other folks hate it. And that–for folks who don’t like to question their faith, or to look deeply at it, the movie can feel “threatening.” But I adore the key message–that Dogma is bad, as is being completely locked in, without introspection. But that “having an idea” and then seeking further clarification can be good and also do a lot of good in the world.
**two of the ones Father held up as “excellent examples of catholic faith!” in our particular parish juuuust so happened to be cheating on their respective spouses–With each other🙄🙄🙄… although, they DID eventually divorce those original spouses to get married to each other… so I guess there’s that?🙃
*infallibility of the current pope* whoever that current pope may be!
I.e. how NOW we look back on certain popes and can actually say they were wrong, did the wrong thing(s), or in some cases,were literally TERRIBLE human beings!
Also mary being a virgin… NOT a virginian!🤣
I loooove Dogma. And I left church around a similar time, but for me it was before I was confirmed, at 12 (protestant, not catholic). It was during confirmation class that I took it upon myself to read the whole Bible. Uh, that thing has some plot holes. And my confirmation teacher was very uninterested in my views on that. Started me on a whole path flirting with Wicca and Buddhism on my way to agnosticism and finally atheism. Anyway, it’s been a hot minute since I rewatched Dogma and I should remedy that.
I don’t love Idiocracy and I feel like my objections went past just the eugenics (which you have to admit, play a pivotal role in the beginning of the movie), but it’s been a lot of years since I watched it so I don’t remember what bothered me as much anymore.
…I’ve only read bits of the other major holy books but I am with you on it being hard to reconcile what you’re taught about christianity with a reading of the full text of the bible…not just plot holes but some of the stories are pretty much difficult to see in any kind of light that doesn’t make them various kinds of concerning…from what bill hicks referred to as “that wacky, fire&brimstone revelations ending” to (for example) some of the stuff that proceeds the whole sodom & gomorrah unpleasantness…it’s…not what I’d been lead to expect before I made my way through the thing?
…handy to have done it though…at least when the jehovah’s witness folks come knocking
Absolutely. I find it funny to phrase the problem as plot holes, but the bigger problem is moral inconsistencies – both within the book, and versus what my pastor (who was very progressive) would say in church.
I don’t mean to disparage Christians. Christianity does something good for a lot of people. And there are various ways for people to reconcile the Bible with their views. It’s just a little too squishy for me.
I love Idiocracy & said on this site before it seems more like a documentary these days. Office Space was great too. Loved GPB too & own the soundtrack CD.
Office Space is almost required watching for folks in IT, SW development and engineering. It seems many of us had a boss like Lumberg.
That’s precisely why one of my in-laws won’t watch it. Too close to home, apparently.
I just have a regular ol office job and Office Space is basically a documentary.
I fully agree. I’ve been hearing it was a documentary since before I’d had an office job. Turned out to be chillingly accurate.
another person who was raised Catholic, and I remember thinking before confirmation; “I’m too young to be making this kind of decision”
Cut to a few years later, after attending college and being exposed to some ideas…
“I’m not Catholic anymore” didn’t go over very well just after midnight mass on winter break…
What kept me from enjoying Dogma more was I had read Good Omens not too long before the movie came out, so while I liked Dogma well enough, it wasn’t quite the Catholic apocalyptic comedy I wanted.
Good Omens has been sitting on my bookshelf for years. I should really get around to it.
Highston only ever got a pilot episode on Amazon. It had so much potential and a great cast including Shaq and Flea. Once a year, I still find myself checking that it hasnt been picked up.
…so, the movie limitless I could take or leave…but when they made a tv show I watched the pilot just to reassure myself that it was as awful as I expected so I could ignore it from there on out &…well…it was kind of a delight?
…it got cancelled & there’s only one season as far as I know but I enjoyed it way more than seems reasonable & honestly don’t get why it got cancelled…it seemed to have figured out exactly the degree of not-seriously it needed to take itself to work…& the episode that is a kind of homage to ferris bueller’s day off was practically sublime from where I was sitting
…I’m sure there are others but I’m trying to decide if I ought to be trying to get a headstart on the DOT or try for another hour or two of sleep before putting one together a bit more hastily?
The House of Yes:
The House of Yes is so good… and so fucked up…
“Halt and Catch Fire.” This was on for 4 seasons on AMC. I am not even sure what it is about it that grabs me, since I am not in IT and don’t especially love computers or gadgetry. I think it is the nostalgia of the era (80s/early 90s). It also introduced me to Lee Pace and Mackenzie Davis and I now love her in everything. It’s currently on Netflix.