Sunday!
There are the movies that win Best Actress/Actor, Best Director, and Best Film. These are the movies that tend to be seen after they win the Oscar (at least in my household).
There are the movies that win Best Sound Design, Best Costume Design, Best Visual Effects. These are the ones that I probably saw months ago (and not on DVD either… in the theater).
So that indicates to me that stuff like Mad Max: Fury Road, Star Wars, The Martian, that sort of thing, will get all of the awards for the less impressive Oscars and the stuff I’ve been hearing “buzz” about will be winning the big ones. The busiest bees have been The Revenant, Spotlight, and Quentin Tarantino usually gets one jillion nominations and The Hateful Eight looks like it’s going to be no exception to that… especially since, on top of stuff like his scripts, direction, and themes (which are usually catnip for the Academy), he filmed this in an old-school aspect, to be shown on old-school film, with an old-school overture and intermission in the middle and everything.
That sort of thing just puts them over the moon.
It’s probably the film that I’m looking the most forward to seeing even though Tarantino’s films usually leave me feeling like I have just done the equivalent of eating food that I found in a bag in the park. It might taste good. It might taste great!
But processing it is unpleasant.
We’ll see if this one is different, though.
So… what are you reading and/or watching?
(Featured Image is “Edison’s Telephonoscope” by George du Maurier from Punch Almanack for 1879)
I’m now effectively reading three books simultaneously: Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, and David Wong’s Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits, the last of which I’m probably the closest to finishing (I started it yesterday and I’m already nearly halfway through).Report
Almost done with DEPENDENT RATIONAL ANIMALS. Am liking THE EXPANSE – which I would have thought would be receiving more attention in such sci-fi-loving environs as the hereabouts.
With the finale of INTO THE BADLANDS last week, TWD in hiatus, GAME OF THRONES far off, and so on, we seem be undergoing a seasonal “Sunday night luridly violent escapism” deficit not likely to be filled by AGENT X even if Olga Fonda’s in this episode.Report
Yeah, I’ve been diggin’ The Expanse as well. I especially like the stuff with Tom Jane, Space Detective; not the character’s actual name, but I think we all know it’s his true name.Report
Wow… impressed you are tackling DRA. I’m staying decidely on the lighter side of things and reading McArdle’s book, The Up Side of DownReport
DRA is not the Adrian Peterson or Marshawn Lynch of philosophy books, tackling-wise. From what I’ve read so far of MacIntyre – AFTER VIRTUE, DRA, bits and pieces elsewhere – he seems generally to write more on average FBS rather than NFL-level (tackling-wise, not wise-wise), maybe even Division II or lower: Not a negative comment or dismissal, particularly for a book that originated in a lecture, and whose subject is ethics in society, or moral philosophy corrected for impairment or distortion by a type of pervasive implicit elitism: I see no reason why it shouldn’t be readily intelligible for any open-minded lay reader – though that’s also not to say that, from my point of view, “Ethics for Dummies” would be the only appropriate mode for addressing the subject.Report
Heh, most people don’t find his prose all that accessible – its more than a little clunky. But yes, mostly meant that few venture further than After Virtue. DRA is also a non-standard choice given that most folks don’t much care how he squares the Aristotelian circle.Report
I suppose “entertainment value” may have to be figured into “accessibility,” but I was thinking more in terms of straightforward intelligibility, though I’ll acknowledge that on occasion MacIntyre does produce a sentence that even those well-read in philosophy may need to read over a couple of times.
Haven’t had a chance to finish yet. Don’t know the extent to which what I took to be promises of a “scientific natural moral law” have been fulfilled.Report
You would think so, I didn’t they could do James Corey’s vision justice, but they have,
Yes, they need to bump up the Olga Fonda quotient, what’s wrong with these people, interesting casting to try to make Daniel Benzali seem noble,Report
and this looks interesting:
http://tvseriesfinale.com/tv-show/colony-usa-series-pilot-still-available-online/Report
Does indeed. Will check out the preview soon. LEGENDS S2 was also a significant improvement over S1… finale tonight.Report
As for COLONY, now having checked the OnDemand trailer and “Behind the Wall” movie, I’m concerned about the very high concept, especially from executive producers one of whom has LOST at the top of his resume: Hard to trust that there will ever be a satisfying explanation for the central seemingly-inexplicables.Report
I am supposed to be recieving (like tomorrow!) Rockwell Kents N by E, so am mentally clearing space for that. Will probably watch Ex Machina tonight.Report
It’s been a big reading/watching week or two for me.
Reading has mostly been pleasure. I just finished Sarah Vowell’s Lafayette In the Somewhat United States, which in addition to being a hoot was chock full of stuff I did not know about. I also started Avenue of Mysteries, the new John Irving book. Like all of Irving’s books, the first bit is a slog. Whether it eventually gets to a can’t-put-down place, a la Owen Meany or Hotel New Hampshire remains to be seen. Also, I’m picking my way through Elvis Costello’s kind-of-sort-of autobiography, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink. Not surprisingly, the bits about his life are overshadowed for me by the parts where he dives into the writing of his various lyrics. Wisely, he seems to concentrate on the songs that mean the most to him, not the ones that have become the bigger hits.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about stories — what they are, what they mean, how they motivate us — and so I have also recently reread Anansi Boys, Witches Abroad, and Phillip Pullman’s translation of the Grimm tales.
I took the boys to see SW:TFA, which was fun and entertaining without being overly memorable. Also, there was much re-watching of Christmas movies: Elf, Scrooged, White Christmas, and of course Nightmare. Turns out none of them have changed since we saw them last year, or any of the preceding years before that. We also tried Bill Murray’s new Christmas show on Netflix, which I had high hopes for being something other than “meh…”, which is what it ended up being.
The youngest and I have been watching Into the Badlands, which has been like watching a very, very long Bad Kung Fu movie over time — which is to say that we are totally loving it. Speaking of which, I also watched both the Korean film The Man From Nowhere and Keanu Reeves’ John Wick, which were also like watching bad Kung Fu movies, and which I also thoroughly enjoyed.
I also watched the Dr. Who christmas special, which was really delightful — one of the best Who’s I have seen in a really, really long time. One that gives me hope that maybe the show might hit a much-needed upward arc.
I got roped into watching Insurgent, which I really did not like at all.
Coming up are some things I am exited to watch: The second season of Fargo, the new Neil Gaiman show Lucifer, The Expanse, The Man from Uncle movie, and the last half-season of Person of Interest. It’s not often I have multiple things I am looking forward to watching, so this is kind of cool for me.
And finally, even though it’s not a book, tv show or movie, I caught the first two episodes of season two of Serial this week. I can tell already that I’m going to enjoy this season far more than I did the first.Report
I thought S2 of Fargo was beyond fantastic (and you may recall I was a naysayer on S1).
A niggle on Lucifer – although it’s originally a Neil Gaiman character (from Sandman), the show is (supposedly) actually based on Mike Carey’s spin-off comic of the same name (which was very good, and one of the very few OK’s Gaiman gave to ANYONE else to spin ANYTHING off Sandman).
I say (supposedly), because if initial reports I’ve read are correct, they are ALSO ditching nearly all of what made Carey’s story so great (the religious themes would be a tough sell on network TV) and making a procedural out of it instead, with The Morningstar solving crimes or whatever-the-fish.
IOW, it COULD be good anyway (though I am obviously skeptical), but it appears to have precious little to do with Gaiman at this point.Report
I DVR’d a bunch of Hallmark Christmas movies because they are one of my guilty pleasures. I will probably save them for my first work trip of the new year and hope I can find the holiday spirit from a hotel room in New England. I also just finished the first half-season of Quantico which is pretty dumb but also kind of fun.
As for the New Year in general, which is my favorite holiday, I am on vacation this week and doing my usual organization/project/cleaning surge to start the New Year off on the right foot. The label maker has fresh batteries, the Goodwill pile grows by the day and I have two laptops going so I can multi-task. So fun!Report
P.S. Mercy Street starts January 17 which I gather is going to sort of be Downton Abbey set in American Civil War, I’ll have to check it out and hope it’s good.
And if you haven’t seen it, I urge everyone to try The Last Kingdom which was awesome.Report
I’m mostly too sick to know what I’ve been doing. But during the less-sick parts, I’ve been watching the british TV show Skins. (It was making me dizzy during the more sick parts.) And I during one of the moderately-sick parts I watched The Gruffalo’s Child. Which is adorable.
I started and put down about 8 different books (reckon I’ll finish them when not-sick), but one I did finish was Keri Spelling’s Living with Ghosts, which is a French-influenced secondary world fantasy with SOME dark / erotic elements but not very many. Mostly it’s very good, if one likes that sort of thing, which I do.Report
I watched the first couple seasons of Skins; a lot of those actors have gone on to bigger and better things (at least two of them to Game of Thrones, Nicholas Hoult to various things).Report
Not so much what I’m watching as how. Long story short, last week I got a SiliconDust HDHomeRun Prime set top box, which plays to apps over the local area network instead of directly to a monitor. Yesterday I got the CableCard from Comcast necessary to handle encrypted digital channels. Initial review follows…
Activating things was the usual cable company adventure. Comcast has an 877 number where the people answering the phone only do CableCard activation, which was helpful. By the third call, and after considerable poking around, I had all of the information necessary for the tech to send out the commands. (Imagine a medium where people could write a description of all the info you needed, and where to find it, and it was kept up to date. Nah, that’s crazy thinking.) A few minutes later the box could be manually tuned (carrier plus stream). I watched most of the Broncos-Bengals game at my desk, full-screen and high-definition. It looked good.
Somewhat later the box had gotten the local “linear” channel lineup so I could switch to SiliconDust’s provided player application. It’s pretty basic — limited channel guide, simple resizing. An almost identical Android app is available at the Play Store for 99 cents. No problems watching the HD stream on my phone as I wondered around the house.
The device also functions as a DLNA-compliant video source on your local area network. VLC, the swiss army knife of media playback applications, supports DLNA. VLC sees the box; it switches the channels; it plays the video. VLC also provides me with all the functions that become necessary when you play video on a monitor that is set up to look good for computer stuff — brightness, contrast, gamma, scaling, cropping, etc. Or in my case, dynamic range compression for the audio — not too loud, not too soft, not too much variation.
The SiliconDust box has three independent tuners. I’ve verified that It can deliver two streams simultaneously. At some point I’ll haul out another device and test that it will handle three.Report