Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION The Anywhere Machine So what are you WATCHING?

Is anyone else checking out Glow (aka "Gorgeous Ladies Of Wrestling") on Netflix?

I have to say that so far the performances are very good, and the show really does capture the bleakness and horrifically bad aesthetics of the 1980s very well.

Rewatching Psych in the truck.

My wife and I are watching it slowly (usually at the end of the night on weekends), and so far I love it. I'm 3 eps in, and the performances have been fantastic, the tone is the perfect mixture of humor and seriousness, and there's just a lot to like. Both Allison Brie and Betty Gilpin are terrific here, and show some serious acting chops in addition to the humor and physicality of the roles. I can't wait to watch the whole thing but its so good, and so visually awesome, that I want to take my time!

Shows my wife and I have watched recently:

Turn seasons #1-3, which has been fantastic. The series starts off kind of slow, and with good reason as its building up everything, but by midway through season 2 the stakes are super-high and the plot deliciously complex.

The Borgias (the Netflix / Cannal series, not the Showtime one), seasons #1-3, which was also really great. A more nuanced and historically accurate depiction of the Borgias which included all the various rumors about them. While the other Borgias show was good, this one felt a bit more visceral, and that might be because most of the actors were new to me. I like it quite a bit.

Better Call Saul Season #3 - phenomenal. By now its clear BCS is a continuation / prequel of Breaking Bad and just as good. This season even better than the first and second.

Fargo Season #3 - I loved it. While the ending was not as great as the other seasons IMO, I thought Gloria Burgle, played by Carrie Coon, as the lead was incredible, and the villain V.M. Varga was the scariest villain they've ever had. Such a quirky, strange show that I love watching.

Frontier Season #1, a 6 issue episode show on Netflix starring Jason Mamoa in early Colonial US / Canada during the era the Hudson's Bay Company monopolized the fur trade in the late 1600's. For those who like realistic, historical fiction, this is highly recommended.

House of Cards seasons 3-5. I have to say...once Frank attains the Presidency, the series starts to really falter and loses a lot of its charm. Season 3 wore me down, season 4 was tough to get through but ended on a high note and then season 5 did the opposite. I don't love it as much as I used to.

Ripper Street Seasons #1 and #2, an old favorite of mine that I wanted my wife to watch. More in the episodic vein, its not really a 'binge' type show so I wanted to break up the seasons in between other shows. It's a brillaint detective / CSI series set during the post Ripper years in London's East End, and the cast is just brillaint.

Up next, now that I finagled free Showtime out of my cable company for 6 months (the rotten bastards that they are): Ray Donovan Season 4 (love this show), Masters of Sex seasons 3-4 (love it), Homeland seasons 5-6 (curious to see if they can keep it good) and Billions (trying out).

Oh, also, The Keepers Documentary on Netflix, which was truly brilliant. We seem to have hit a golden age of crime documentaries right now with Making a Murderer (incredible) and Jinx (fantastic) and this one is the very best so far. Totally heart-breaking, it was also inspiring about how survivors can overcome their trauma and how regular people can work together to start righting incredible wrongs that seem insurmountable.

It's also confirmed for me that despite being raised Catholic, I simply can't ever go back to the Catholic Church.

Yeah, I'm not much for binge-watching. As with devouring a whole novel in a couple of days, I end up forgetting super-fast what I just experienced. I prefer doling out shows 1 or 2 episodes at a time. 3 at the maximum (and that not very often).

Reaching the end, I was struck by how often I'd predicted a certain twist, and it hadn't happened. At least not so far. So that's always good. When you get to the end, let me know what you think of the developments.

I caught Edgar Wright's new flick Baby Driver last week and it's totally awesome. Please go see this one guys!

Found a live version of a Cinematic Titanic production on YouTube. (For those playing at home, CT was one of the offshoot projects from parts of the Mystery Science Theater crew. They made several episodes between 2007 and 2013, marketing them solely via disc sales and live shows.)

The movie is a truly bleak spectacle called The Astral Factor, "starring" a bunch of made-for-TV rejects, though it appears to have been intended for the theater, since I'm only halfway through and have already counted like three butt-shots. The riffers are doing their best with it, though my sound could be better. I don't know if it would convert someone who wasn't already a fan of this comedy genre. On the other hand, if you love Seventies trainwrecks, it may be worth muddling through anyway.

Aside from Stephanie Powers, who is as thoroughly unlikable (and frequently pants-less) as everyone else involved, the actor with the most, uh... star power in this dog is Frank Ashmore: of original V fame. He was also one of the unlucky co-pilots in Airplane. He does what he can here, given he's basically a bargain basement Norman Bates-Carrie White fusion with Dorothy Hamill's hair. (Oh, and you MSTies might remember him as the ill-fated buddy of that bewildered clone dude in Parts: The Clonus Horror.)

UPDATE: Slogged through the rest of this turkey last night. It never improved, except in the sense that more unlikable and/or uninteresting people died, though not nearly enough of them.

(Elke Sommer tried her hand at a verse of "In The Pines." The riffers were off their game as they missed the opportunity there for a few Kurt Cobain/MTV Unplugged jokes. D'oh!)

However, as the delightful cherry atop the manure sundae, I could swear that in the closing scene, someone was holding an actual Legion comic! But between the terrible print and my terrible eyesight, I can't guarantee that.

My older son has gotten me addicted to the History Channel show Forged in Fire. It's a competition show where four blacksmiths forge knives and other cutting objects and then re-create various historical edged weapons. The creations are then judged and put to the test to see how they would perform. I'm not any kind of weapon nut or really all that much a fan of reality competitions (other than Survivor), but something about this show entertains me and holds my interest. I guess it's just less subjective than talent competitions and easier to see the results on television than cooking competitions and their ilk. In any case it's a surprisingly nice show to help fill the summer doldrums.

Just finished the Wire. A pretty scathing ending. Going to have to take a day or two to digest it, but what a great show!

I just saw Dunkirk (in IMAX 70 mm). I really, really enjoyed it. IMO it was pretty much flawless, although my viewing partner said he thought Saving Private Ryan (a film I found OK but a bit too sentimentally sappy and generic) was better, so take that for what you will.

Saw Lucio Fulci's unconventional giallo Don't Torture a Duckling. While the culprit is pretty obvious, I loved the exploration of scapegoats, religious devotion, and small town paranoia. It's a damn solid thriller with a hell of an ending.

Got to talking with our own Kent on another thread about Columbo. I've found a site with good-quality copies of all the episodes. I've been trying to watch one a day every day for a couple of weeks. I'm already up to Season Two. They've just introduced his basset hound, who apparently never had any name but "Dog" through the whole series. Wikipedia claims that the producers added the dog as a way of obliquely flipping off their superiors who, in the spirit of fixing what was never broken, wanted the title character to have a sidekick.

I did cheat and skip ahead first to the episode where Martin Landau's plays the homicidal twins, though. It seemed only right.

Tonight...
Orphan Black's last episode.
Thanks Tatiana & everybody, it's been a great 5 years!
Let Helena live!

I had a lot of issues with this season, but the finale was really, really good. A lot of closure and stayed true to all the characters. I was glad they handled Rachael's appearance the way they did. If they had contrived to have her join the other four, that would have rung hollow.

I didn't get around to watching the last season of Orphan Black. I really should.

Right now, it's Game of Thrones, Killjoys and Dark Matter.

Wynona Earp failed to entice me into a second season (although I liked the first season fine enough, it's just not quite enough to motivate me to keep up with it).

Looking forward to Netflix's Defenders.

Between the upcoming Gifted, Runaways and Cloak and Dagger series, and new seasons of Agents of SHIELD, Flash, Arrow, Supergirl, Legends of Tomorrow and, eventually, Legion, TV's as crawling with super-hero offerings as the movies are! What a time to be a fan of comic-book superheroes!

I grew up in an era where Wonder Woman and the Hulk were pretty much it, for superheroes on TV, so this is like an amazing smorgasboard.

I finally hopped on the Glow hype train and ended up binge watching it in two days! All the characters are distinct and multi-dimensional, even the supporting characters. I was apprehensive at first because the trailers sold it as a "chick flick" sort of TV series, but it's all kinds of awesome, especially any time Marc Maron is on screen. Super stoked for season 2!

Just binge-watched Defenders last night. Pretty decent.

They managed to tie K'un Lun and the Hand together in an interesting way, that may or may not have anything to do with the comic book canon, but was certainly cool to see, creating some cool connective thread.

Yeah, I had a few issues, also. With only 10 episodes to wrap up as much as possible, there seemed to be a couple of filler episodes that could've been better utilized.

Rachel's ending was good. There was no way I would've accepted her being embraced by the other clones. The thing is...I'm not sure exactly why I feel that way. I mean, I liked Helena by her second appearance, even though, as far as we know, she's killed more clones than Rachel did. Rachel killed what...2 clones? Helena was upwards of about 10 or so, not to mention the other people she killed. It's like they made them them both coins with one side of empathy & vulnerabilities and the other strength of purpose, but Helena's flips up more of the former, and Rachel's more of the latter. But I feel for Rachel, too, I just don't particularly like her. Both of them were raised under deplorably manipulative conditions, and neither received much in the loving/nurturing department. Is it that they gave Helena her amusing little "quirks" and a cute likable accent? I'll be trying to figure out my feelings toward them whenever I do a re-watch.




It was pretty good. My biggest problem with it was Luke Cage's two "Deus ex machina" appearances. The first to save Danny in the Midland Circle boardroom, and the second showing up at the dojo with Sowande. At least they showed him getting the clue to Midland Circle, but to arrive at the boardroom from a parking ticket clue? And how he captured Sowande when the last we seen he was getting his ass kicked by him before being run over by a dump truck is beyond me. Other than those things, I enjoyed the ride.

Finished the Twin Peaks revival. Mixed feelings, which I suppose is inevitable. Back in the day I was the biggest Twin Peaks fan I knew, which means I remember all the good and the bad, and not just coffee and cherry pie. So I had much lower prescription nostalgia goggles than most. It actually had a lot more classic Peaks than I expected. I thought Lynch would pretty much make some new thing with the same actors and call it Twin Peaks. And they actually brought things together in a relatively coherent way before blowing them apart in a final hour of incoherence. And anyone who didn't expect THAT clearly didn't know Lynch or Twin Peaks.

My biggest gripe, and it's a biggie, is the criminal misuse of Sherilyn Fenn as Audrey. Beware the TL;DR rant that follows. They clearly recognized that people were eager about her, because they waited 2/3 of the show to bring her in, constantly teasing us with things that made us speculate. Then they gave us several unpalatable scenes of a character we couldn't even recognize, that didn't tie into anything else or tell us anything about her intervening years. Then after one admittedly awesome but pure nostalgia moment, it explodes into a WTF totally unrelated to anything else on the show, and then she's gone. Her weird moment was the cliffhanger leading into the finale, and it was never even addressed. Never shared a scene with a single other character from the old or new show, except for extras and one character created just for her scenes. And lots of conversation about characters we've never even heard of.

We learn from references to her in other people scenes that she was in a coma after the original series, and that while she was in a coma she was raped by one of the villains and had a son. None of her seems even acknowledges that, let alone addresses it in a significant way or gives her scenes with those characters. It's just... ugh.

The flash at the end of her episode with the blinding white room,just after she flips out at the roadhouse, seem to indicate she's still in a coma and it's all in her head. I expected Coop to address that along with Diane and Laura, but obviously once the Laura stuff went seriously sideways, it didn't really matter as EVERTHING was re-written.

Nice to see this thread is still kicking! Brian, I was also a huge fan of the original of the show (as was my wife). It was actually a point of conversation early on when we were dating. Anyhow, I agree about Audrey. I have to review the whole thing but wasn't much point to her except being raped by a demon and birthing an evil son.

I liked the first 3 episodes, then they lost me a bit with the Dougie stuff. I thought it was painful...I didn't feel like watching it because of Dougie. But after episode 7 or so I got into it. Last 10 episodes were fantastic but the last episode threw me for a loop. I knew it would...episode 17 tied too many loose ends. I had a feeling ep 18 was going to give us more loose ends.

I've wavered between loving and loathing this "season". I get Lynch's predilection for extended scenes and non-sequitur, but it was in overdrive through these 18 hours. An entire scene watching Jacobi paint shovels? The revolving cast of Roadhouse regulars whose stories ultimately led nowhere? The escaped creature from the glass box in New York (though you could argue it was Judy)? Michael Cera?

Although it hit me last night that Cera's abysmal, interminable scene may actually play into Lynch's narrative, or more correctly, Frank's reaction might. His nearly inscrutable exasperation during Wally's speech perfectly mirrored his reaction in his office as the Double Coop story climaxed. He just sat there the whole time watching this increasingly absurd circus happen and subtly shook his head and thought "what is this B.S.?"

I've mentioned before (maybe not here, I forget), that Lynch doesn't seem to like a lot of his characters very much, especially the original Peaks characters, and this seemed to play into the idea that he doesn't even like most of the trappings of Twin Peaks very much. Aside from Lucy's surprising turn as the hero, EVERYONE just stood around and watched as the new kid with a magic hand punched Pinata Bob into oblivion. I half-expected Lynch to break character and extend the middle finger toward the camera and say "Happy now?". It's also possibly a comment on the passivity of the movie/TV watching experience which may be why Lynch soured on the form (until a boatload of money brought him back for this).

The second hour of the finale instead let Lynch focus on something he does seem to have passion towards, the eternal victimhood of Laura Palmer and Cooper's inability to save her. Here I thought is was a well done, if bleak examination of the downfall of both characters. Sherryl Lee is always impressive (I actually thing she deserved far more credit for the harrowing FWWM), and Laura/Karrie is pitch perfect as the eternal lost girl who just keeps falling deeper into darkness no matter what she tries culminating in the horrifying scream at the end when she realises it's all happening again. It paired well with Cooper's ineptitude, from his cognitive dissonance about the dead guy in her apartment, to his taking her to the worst possible place for her (the house where it happened), to his lost and confused demeanor at the end "What YEAR is this?". She's truly his Kryptonite, reducing him from the cartoonish, effective "Coop", to the overwhelmed and defeated Cooper. A dark note to go out on, but it is Lynch after all.

I liked Saving Private Ryan but agree it was sentimental, sappy, and generic. Which I can say for most Spielberg films...yet I like them as well. I am really excited about Dunkirk. I don't go to the theater often. Waiting for it come out so I can watch at home. I'm a Nolan fan so I was expecting something great.