The Arrested Development episode with the Bluth fundraiser that was also kind of about whether the show was going to survive was terrific.

Right? All he had to do was head off into the sunset and he'd be probably be printed on money in a few centuries time. Now he's a joke.

I think it's more to help you see the show's "present day" as near our own present day.

Station Eleven's "present" is in the 2040s and it did create some intuitive weirdness to see a 2040 civilisation that's essentially regressed, even given their pandemic. It's a little stranger again with TLOU, because there is some semblance of functional government and technological development, so if you set it mostly ten years in the future, you have to try to work out what cultural and tech development might happen in those intervening years under these exceptionally odd circumstances.

Making their present line up with our present solves that, and it's just plain neater to present the audience with a parallel 2023.

One of my very favourite bits of Cunk - her quick 3 minute Moments of Wonder bit about the nature of Time -

https://youtu.be/NvpbW7JRu0Q

I think something that, subconsciously, makes her work especially well for me is that she speaks in such a similar tone and cadence to Professor Brian Cox (who she has interviewed).

"Where does your lap go when you stand up?"

Morgan's performance as Cunk is incredible.

Black Mirror's San Junipero, imho, is better than a lot of movies that have won bagfuls of awards. The writing is knockout, the cast are terrific (and at the time, came out of nowhere to me) and aesthetically and tonally and thematically it grabbed hold of me like little else.

I would love to see it on a theatre screen.

She's definitely got a distinct thing. For some reason though, she's one of the only actors I can think of where I'm totally on board about it. I think with someone like Cruise it feels too blatantly like a focus grouped and stage managed persona, whereas with Lyonne it feels like she probably is closer to that person than not.

Huh, hadn't noticed that. Good eye.

People are raving about a particular TLOU episode for hitting beats S11 was all about, it feels fairly naturally relevant.

I don't think it's by any means a stretch for it to come up semi regularly in the context of the TLOU chatter regardless when it had shots like this or this.

There's an element of magic realism to it, and some dreamy imagery that isn't really explained, but that's about the height of it in that regard.

The first few eps feel a little scattered and random at times, but around ep 4 it becomes apparent it's all been deliberate, so they feel pretty different in retrospect. A lot of stuff that feels like a random throwaway line turns out to have a lot more significance than it seemed to at first.

So I dunno if I could tell you the pace picks up, but the story comes into focus suddenly.

People are raving about TLOU's ep 3 in particular, which dabbles in the stuff S11 used for bread & butter.

I'd also add "Watch at least one other episode before San Junipero."

I think SJ is Charlie Brooker's masterpiece, but I think you need a feel for Black Mirror's usual tone to have a sense of what a radical departure it was, and because the cute little trick at the end will work way better then.

The thing is, too, as stuff like this gets more commonplace and shittier, we're going to lose the ear to tell the difference.

What I mean is, CGI can be incredible and flawless and indistinguishable, like it was for a while as the art of it was being showcased; or it can be Marvel's crunched out fast food junk, which is now the standard.

When AI voice work becomes commonplace, it'll get reduced to the same lifeless kind of mass production product as that, something that's as cheap and easy and standard to produce as possible, and we'll all get used to hearing voiceovers in that range. And the reality is, no matter how advanced it gets, AI is never going to come up with stuff like Mark Hamill's Joker out of the blue.

War of the Roses.

First half feels like any ol' meetcute movie romance of the era, with Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner. But it's not - it's a Danny Devito movie, and the black comedy emerges as the marriage starts breaking down and getting ugly. One of my favorite movies, because it's just so well written and Douglas and Turner subvert the kinds of roles they're both famous for brilliantly.

Whoops, my bad

The article does have a sort of point - the civil war metaphor is completely incoherent imho, and it is bizarre to see it trotted out consistently without any examination.

The Irish Civil War was about as clear cut a conflict as a Civil War can get. It was rooted in a very stark and simple dilemma - take what you can get of your own state now, or hold out for all or nothing so nobody's left behind and nothing is compromised.

Treating it all as some sort of bewildering folly of whim is bizarre to Irish people when it's only just passing from living memory.

The tragedy of the war was that it was totally ideological - that's why it famously set brother against brother, because even after everything they'd all shared together, they both had reasons to fight for opposite sides. It wasn't like the English Civil War, where it was about allegiances, or the US Civil War where it was about states' rights to keep slaves - it was about what you, personally, thought.

It is not something that happened out of the blue or without explanation.

That said - I grew up in a small village, and Calvary is a fucking documentary. I don't think people would be as irritated to think McDonagh spent most of his life in England as they will be at "a load of Blarney".

Nobody considers Shane McGowan anything other than Irish and he was born in Kent.

I really think BWP is as superb a drama as it is a fun horror, about Heather realizing she's gotten herself and her friends killed by something they can't possibly understand, and her performance is such a huge part of that.

The method camping-in-a-forest stuff can only get so much credit, the whole movie lives or dies on her central performance.

Imho the first season is brilliant, but the subsequent two get weird in an attempt to keep the premise going and almost invert a lot of the stuff that set S1 apart.

There's a semi-documentary called "Dawson City - Frozen Time" that I highly recommend.

Dawson City in the Yukon was the last stop for a lot of film reels during the Gold Rush. By the time they got there, the relatively fragile nitrate films were often a little tatty, and the subject films weren't commercial enough anymore to be worth transporting any further, so they just disposed of them. But it was just one spoke on the wheel, plenty of other cities would have been the dead end for film reels like that.

In the seventies, a trove of these old dumped films happened to be discovered where there had once been an indoor swimming pool and ice rink. They had used the old pit as a dump to infill it for the rink, and the local permafrost happened to preserve a bunch of the film.

Many of the films recovered, even in their incomplete state, simply do not exist anywhere else, or weren't even known to exist. As I understand it, a number are completely unidentified - that is, we have part of the film, but we have no idea who is in it or what it's called or who made it.

That's just one city, and just a fraction of the films that one city would have disposed of, and we only have them due to civil and environmental happenstance.

It's not a myth, that stuff was just considered disposable, and it was disposed of.

Data in itself is white noise. It's only useful if you know what to look for.

The almighty algorithm is a dumb tool, it can only do what is asked of it. If Netflix's executives do not understand which metric is meaningful, then it doesn't matter how many they have access to.

Netflix supposedly hangs big decisions on the early completion rate. I assert that's a completely wrongheaded approach that is burdening them with a growing library of very expensive dead weight nobody will ever watch again; and worse still, it's developing a reputation for that.

1899 wasn't a show I wanted to rush. I wanted to pace it out and marinate in it a little.

While I was doing that, it was cancelled, so now I'm just never going to complete it at all, nor rewatch it. It's pointless.

So for a viewer like me, Netflix's entire investment in it has instantly gone down the drain. And I'm a little less likely to bother with their next big ticket project, in case the same happens to it too.

Early completion rate is easily measurable, but is it useful? People don't like Netflix's all-in-one-go releases because they want to sit down for ten hours in a row, they like it because they can watch the whole lot at precisely the pace that suits them. Netflix's tunnel vision penalizes them, and the shows that suit that kind of viewing best.

I don't think their apparent 2 week completion rate obsession makes sense, at least not for every show - not least because stuff like "Viewer trust that the next show won't be cancelled too" can't be measured in it, but absolutely have an effect on the service's appeal.

Netflix isn't like a regular "live" channel, nobody catches something serendipitously in syndication. They have to actively select it. Show by show these decisions probably feel like they make sense, but they've ended up with a library of dead ends nobody will ever bother with.

That raises questions about stuff like First Kill or Warrior Nun though, which performed way above their weight despite visibly costing about $5.96 an episode.

Somebody should have won something for Halt and Catch Fire. More things. Lots of things.

>"I was blessed with this face," she says. "I was born to play witches and bitches until the day I die."

I love Michelle Gomez.