I watched Requiem in high school and it floored me. I rewatched last year and it fell a bit flat. It felt too DARE-esque. From what little I know, drugs seem to harm people around the user more than the user. Losing your arm isn't a common result of drug use, destroying your family is. That's why the opening scene is way more effective to me than the ending.

Also why The Wire is such a good show. The Wire's vision of the consequences of drug use is more representative.

imo it's really about addictive behavior in general, and the "original sin" is the mother enabling her son because she's unwilling to give up her TV.

I never really noticed how that TV addiction fed into it, kinda neat.

Requiem is to dramas what Avengers movies are to action. Everything turned up to 11, not that great, overly stylized and so corny, but everyone seems to their they're the ****, instead of just ****.

it's way deeper than that.

Basically, I mean, it's pretty obvious how drug addiction can hurt whole families. I think the movie was trying to flip the idea on its head and show how many people are involved in failing just one. Everything that happened in the movie isn't just the mistakes of the cast, it's propelled forward by a lot of other people and side characters pursuing their own selfish agendas. Pimp, therapist, and the meth doctor, obviously, but even normal people doing 'normal' things, like the pawn broker who knows what's happening and does nothing, or the second doctor who calls the police because he can't be ****ed to offer the main characters any real help, or the TV producers who were intentionally making brain candy. If any of those people had demonstrated any sort of social responsibility, none of the events in the movie would have happened.

(Edit: or the mom's friend, who recommends seeing a seedy a.f. doctor for weight loss, or the cops who cut off the city's supply of heroin cold turkey, or...)

I suppose that theme is there. That societal problems are produced by a bunch of individual choices which are rational in their bubble, but work together to produce toxic results. I hadn't thought of the movie that way.

I wish it could have focused more there than on the stylization. I still hold the view that the first half of the movie is a more interesting and important chain of events than the latter half, where it's just overbearing DARE messaging.

Better than the sequels.

Haha, absolutely loved that back when it came out. I remember waiting so long for it to download over my stupid modem connected to stupid phone line.

I've basically run out of interesting stuff to watch. My son and I watch America's Got Talent on Hulu and I watch American Ninja Warrior. I'm still hanging myself through Westworld Season 2 but combined that's like ~4h of TV a week? I tried watching "Chuck" but got really bored.

Off the top of my head interesting shows I've watched that I would watch again if it were possible to run out of new things to watch: Longmire, Mad Men, Hell on Wheels, Tin Star, The Sopranos, Band of Brothers. Shows I've slowed down due to having too many other shows but will get back to at some point: Frontier, The Man in the High Castle, The Americans, Better Call Saul, The Pacific. Right now we're catching up on the current season of Westworld. Probably pick back up Frontier when we're caught up.

I can't help but interpret this as aesthetic terrorism, but it's still stylistically very cool. Too bad the movie was ****. Gets better after 1m

Damn that's some internet 1.0 ****. The first time I saw that, I probably had to go outside and play for a few hours while that 27mb video ate up all my dialup bandwidth. The special effects look pretty good.

Shows I would highly recommend:
Justified
The Americans
Longmire
Black Sails
Eureka
Vikings
Deadwood
Luther
House of Cards
Person of Interest
White Collar

I thought some of you might be looking for things to watch over the summer, when not much new is airing, the nights are warm and sleep might be short.

Adding to Steven's list:
American Gods
Crazyhead
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
Future Man
Happy!
Letterkenny (was exclusively available in Canada on CraveTV but Hulu recently bought the rights to air in the US)
The Good Place
The Grinder
The Magicians
The Tick (2016)

I really enjoyed The Tick, but it's not for everyone. It's a parody that some people might not fully appreciate.

Yeah, but **** those people.

The Tick is a masterpiece.

I watched the first episode of the US version of Dirk Gently a while ago, does the guy that plays him ever get any less irritating?

So out of all those shows on the above 2 lists, I only enjoyed Futureman and The Good Place; and I didn't get to watch the latest The Good Place yet; it wasn't good enough to pay for the whole season 2 and only the last 5 episodes are on Hulu (hate that crap). I started watching a whole bunch of them but got bored and stopped... like Black Sails, Vikings, Tick, Grinder, Justified. I watched one episode of House of Cards a long time ago and it was mildly interesting, but I've never been a Kevin Spacey fan, and now there's zero chance of me ever watching it.

I started watching This Old House on Hulu. That shows you how bored I am. Geesh.

What are you expecting from TV shows? All those shows, and none of them are good enough? I get that different folks like different things, but seriously, Justified is an excellent show.

Sure, some shows are too goofy or too vulgar or too sci-fi or too whatever, but there are a lot of good programs listed.

*shrug* Just couldn't get into it.

Not really, but I think that's kind of the point? Maybe I should watch the OG version. It's pretty old though, right?

Season 2 of Luke Cage just dropped and I've heard good things about it avoiding the same problems all the other Netflix/Marvel shows dealt with in their sophomore seasons... but I'm two episodes in and I don't get that sense yet. Still enjoying it though.

Nah, the books are from the 80s but the only other proper tv version was the Stephen Mangan one from about 7 or 8 years ago.

I've been ill the last few days, so between naps I watched Future Man in its entirety. I really enjoyed it. It was quite vulgar (too vulgar at times) but funny nonetheless. The episode at JCC was the best one, easily.

Black Sails is available on Hulu now, but since I have seen it already, I think I will try Dirk Gently next.

I've only watched two episodes of Dirk Gently, but, uh, what the **** is this ****

I'm getting excited for the new season of Better Call Saul.

I like Better Call Saul, but if you ask me to name anything of consequence that's happened so far I'm drawing a blank.

Boco, here to mildly dump on everything!

There aren't memorable scenes, but it's fun to watch Saul come up with good cons and to watch Mike be a lovable curmudgeon. And I like the human scale of it.

It just feels a bit like an extended victory lap.

It's all good, man.

This is why I haven't seen it; I'll probably watch it eventually, but it seemed like a gimmick to capitalize on the success of Breaking Bad. I also don't usually care for prequels, because no matter how good they are, you know what does and doesn't matter in the long run. RIP Mike.

I love this scene (massive S1 spoiler) from The Wire so much. I love how much is communicated through body language and that there's no musical score. It adds a bunch of tension and drama to the scene, I feel music would only detract from it.

No score is actually a thing in The Wire, and at times feels a bit awkward, but when it works it works super well.

I watched two episodes of Better Call Saul and was turned off by it.

So the first episode opens with a bunch of heavy-handed scenes showing how poor he is and all. Okay, cool, it's establishing a narrative. Then he meets the two scammer kids, and eventually is going to pull a scam with them. I though, "cool, this will be really cool". I was hoping for just a typical Picaresque moment, where they pull off some hijinks, and shows off how he became involved in criminal activity as well as being a lawyer. If they had just done that, I think it would have been a really entertaining episode.

But, that's not how it went. Nope, of all the characters, they brought Tuco back. When I saw him my eyes rolled. I thought at that moment it was going to be a distasteful twist, and I was confirmed when I watched the next episode. Because now you have like, people beating each other up. And people being brought out to the desert to be executed, then talked out of it by clever rhetoric which isn't actually that clever. And just all of this stupid really over the top action that's not really necessary. It felt like a) they were riding on the Breaking Bad coattails by bringing back Tuco, which was blegh and b) they didn't think they could hold my attention unless if they had some WHOA SO CRAZY guy running around beating people up. Like, you're not Breaking Bad, you're a show about a lawyer, can we not do all of this unnecessary ****?

that's how i felt about star trek TNG it's like OMG you're a space captain AND somehow you have time to drink tea and shave and wax your head? unnecessary and unrealistic

I just finished season one of "Hap and Leonard." I enjoyed it quite a bit. It's about a couple of down on their luck white trash Texans (even though one is black) in the late 1980s who get caught up in a scheme and get in over their heads. There are three seasons, two are on Netflix.

It's vulgar and violent and dark and sometimes funny. Even Brian should like it.

cool beans

hot pockets

I had been cautiously looking forward to Jack Ryan on Amazon and I finally watched it. It did not disappoint. I saw some posts on Facebook about a Vanity Fair review that ripped the show. After watching that show and reading the review it would appear to me the review was designed to get right of center people to watch the show because, despite the fact the reviewer claimed to have watched the first season twice, she clearly is not reviewing the show. If that was an honest review she's insane.

The show had plenty of content to keep SJWs happy but not delivered in a way to offend others. The only thing that's mildly irritating is that a major character, that I'm pretty sure was never written this way, is a Muslim but the way it was done really didn't bother me. If I were to be critical of anything I guess it would be that Ryan could be played with a bit more charisma. Anyway, it's only eight easily digested episodes. I wonder how long until the next season.

Do people really watch shows based on how they might possibly hint at placing on a political scale? I have seriously never, not once, watched a TV show or movie because it sways towards a "left" or "right".

That's not what he was saying at all. He was saying it wasn't too preachy - these days a lot of shows are.