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RelentlessOblivion

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Extreme Engineering had some good episodes. From building cars, to ships, to all sorts of things.

There was another doco about 10 years ago, I think it was made in the UK, called the 7 Industrial Wonders Of The World, which discussed 7 things like the railways ways and sewer systems that changed the way the world worked. It was a good history lesson but above and beyond that it also showed just what people put up with and how hard they worked to achieve some of the biggest things we today take for granted.

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On 5/3/2022 at 12:13 AM, GoatmasterGeneral said:

We had a show called "How It's Made" (no idea if it's still on) that showed not just food, but all different kinds of products being manufactured in the factory. I didn't ever watch it a lot but I'd run across it on YouTube every now and then. I do think there's a kind of beauty in watching the machines do their thing in perfect synchronicity that can be very satisfying and enjoyable. 

 

How It's Made: Bourbon

 

Thanks for the link. It was interesting. The presenters on the UK show i like more. They are very passionate and keen and a little bit eccentric which I like. The food factory program goes into more detail about how the machines  work which I find interesting too. I tried doing a link but I struggle with tech and it didn't work 🤗

 

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  • 6 months later...

We just watched the new Netflix series 1899. I loved it. Doesn't spoonfeed you. Period drama, psychological thriller... alternate history? Techno-surrealist allegory? Sci-fi? It kept my interest sharp, anyway, and it's visually stunning at times. Great design throughout. Keep dubbing off and subtitles on, the language barriers are important to how the characters interact.

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4 hours ago, FatherAlabaster said:

We just watched the new Netflix series 1899. I loved it. Doesn't spoonfeed you. Period drama, psychological thriller... alternate history? Techno-surrealist allegory? Sci-fi? It kept my interest sharp, anyway, and it's visually stunning at times. Great design throughout. Keep dubbing off and subtitles on, the language barriers are important to how the characters interact.

We watched the first episode, I loved it, family was bored. Will probably keep watching it by myself then. And I agree, it was interesting and visually captivating. Dubbing is the devils hellthing, unless it's kidshows.

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  • 8 months later...

Watched Season 3 of Witcher.  I enjoyed Season 1 and 2, but 3 is shit:

 

1. Nonsensical plots that served no purposes.  I am actually not even sure why some plots exist.

2.  Main character, Geralt, pushed to the sides.*

3. Secondary and even tertiary characters pushed to the fore despite having little or no appeal and not particularly compelling plots.  In some cases the characters are almost completely superfluous*

4. Some terrible choreography and some non-sensical battles.

5. Most anti-climactic season finale that seemed almost like a pointless epilogue.

6. Terrible pacing. 

7. Terrible direction, production and editing.

8. Some of the newer actors they have cast are well and truly terrible (especially Meng'er Zhang as Milva - some of the worst acting I have ever seen in my life*)

9. Illogical decision making by characters that goes against their stated goals or personality.

10. Distinctive characters from the books and/or games are transformed into generic Hollywood tropes - eg a prince who is meant to be a child in the book and then becomes a brutal merciless king in the game is turned into your archetypal "leave me alone I just want to be gay" character.  Oh and turning Witcher's best buddy, Dandelion into a gay character when he was a famous womaniser in the book/games so he can have a gay relationship with now gay Radovid.*

11. Stupidly set up narratives that served no purpose.

12. Key concepts from books/games just thrown in without any context or impact on narrative (eg Wild Hunt).

 

*This is where accusations of woke really kick in.  Geralt is the Witcher and he is meant to be the main character.

Yet the show focuses more on Ciri (Geralt's adopted daughter) and Yennefer (Geralt's lover).  This is to the extent these two female characters will be given greater screen time even when to the detriment of the show (eg episode 7 when Ciri wonders through a desert for a whole episode or showing Yennefer sitting around with her surviving buddies having a chat about pretty much nothing).    

Now Ok, Ciri and Yennefer are key characters in books/games but they also focus heavily on tertiary characters some of whom have no actual plot left (eg character Fringila). 

But these characters have something far more important in today's world - they are ethnically/sexually diverse.  

And it just dilutes the show with generic story writing that takes away from the primary narrative.**

 

And hence a show about basically a white heterosexual male gets turned into a show about a diverse group of primarily female characters even if they bring nothing to the plot.

 

**Walking Dead did this too.  It ended up just having huge casts of diverse characters with no compelling story arcs whose whole purpose was to pump up diversity numbers.  

 

"So give the gay guy with one hand a scene and then focus back in on main story and then we give the multi-racial couple a scene and then more main story."

 

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I haven't seen season three (nor do I intend to), but I feel your frustration Dead. I'd heard the grumblings about season two from people who'd read the books. At the time I hadn't read any of them, but I knew the gist of the whole thing, and about midway through the season I got a weird feeling that something was going on with the writing. So much didn't feel like it had been a collaboration of a group all sitting in the same room hashing out continuity and structure with an end goal in mind sort of like, I don't know, a real writer's room. Instead it felt like it had been written by people who were barely speaking to each other. Like someone would get an episode, read the last few pages of the screenplay from the previous episode so they knew where they left off, and just started in with their own ideas. No real compromise. No way to tell an individual no, and just let the pieces fall where they may.

A lot of showrunners who come from a writing background get themselves in over their heads when they get to take responsibility for every other aspect of moving the writing from the page to the screen, and in a lot of cases it's just a matter of not having a strong organizational mindset. Dan Harmon's a great example of this. He can lead a writer's room like nobody's business, but he is an awful people manager and showrunner. Some people just can't make that jump. With The Witcher season two I could have told you the producer/showrunners hadn't set foot in the writer's room, and it shows. They just sorta did whatever they wanted.

Now we're going into season three with the main narrative in shambles, multiple characters taking the place of other usually better characters, and Geralt caught in limbo until they can try and write their way back to him. There's also the matter of the world itself. I actually didn't mind some of the conjunction of the sphere's stuff, and if they were able to bring the main characters around to that aspect of the story they might be able to salvage something. They should give Yen's constant harping on her personal quest for motherhood that interrupts and derails everything a rest, go easy on the teleporting around the map, show the limits of the main characters and make sure they run up against those limits for longer than five minutes, and maybe they could actually manage to bring back some sense of mystery and danger in this world. Something tells me they won't do that, though. I'm checked out at this point. Maybe let Netflix sit on the IP for five years or so, and try again with a group of self contained mini-series

I also kind of wish I had played the Witcher three before I played Cyberpunk 2077. If I had seen CDProjekt Red's order of priority in their method I'd have been able to see the writing on the wall with Cyberpunk. What a mess of a game, and a really poor fit for that studio.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Inexplicably my daughter has decided she likes war movies.

We watched "Dunkirk" the other day which she declared the greatest movie ever made (most recently held by Mary Poppins 2 and practically every other movie she sees until supplanted by the next).

Any recommendations sitting in the 12-13 age rating bracket? i.e. ideally not rated 15. 

Dunkirk was tastefully done. Didn't pull any punches but not too graphic. The soundtrack is pretty funny. Essentially the entire film is an ominous Hans Zimmer build up.

We'll probably watch Saving Private Ryan at the weekend, even though rated 15. I recall it has some pretty grisly scenes which might be a little too much but it is a classic.

Band of Brothers may also be approps.

We watched the trailer for Midway and it looked like a Marvel film - just too much action over substance. So any hollywoodified examples like Pearl Harbour are best avoided.

I watched Oppenheimer with my dad a month ago, he fell asleep somewhere in the middle, but I enjoyed it.

 

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22 hours ago, JonoBlade said:

Inexplicably my daughter has decided she likes war movies.

We watched "Dunkirk" the other day which she declared the greatest movie ever made (most recently held by Mary Poppins 2 and practically every other movie she sees until supplanted by the next).

Any recommendations sitting in the 12-13 age rating bracket? i.e. ideally not rated 15. 

Dunkirk was tastefully done. Didn't pull any punches but not too graphic. The soundtrack is pretty funny. Essentially the entire film is an ominous Hans Zimmer build up.

We'll probably watch Saving Private Ryan at the weekend, even though rated 15. I recall it has some pretty grisly scenes which might be a little too much but it is a classic.

Band of Brothers may also be approps.

We watched the trailer for Midway and it looked like a Marvel film - just too much action over substance. So any hollywoodified examples like Pearl Harbour are best avoided.

I watched Oppenheimer with my dad a month ago, he fell asleep somewhere in the middle, but I enjoyed it.

 

Yeha the beach landing in Saving private ryan is very gory, but the whole movie is pretty disturbing emotionally with the US soldier sparing the life of the german only to slowly be murdered by him etc. If she's fine with that it's a good movie, despite Tom Hanks.

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19 minutes ago, Sheol said:

Yeha the beach landing in Saving private ryan is very gory, but the whole movie is pretty disturbing emotionally with the US soldier sparing the life of the german only to slowly be murdered by him etc. If she's fine with that it's a good movie, despite Tom Hanks.

Hmm. Yeah, I do remember that part "shhh, shhh." It sticks with you so...maybe best avoided. I'm not the kind of parent that fast forwards through scenes, or at least never have before. It's all or nothing. 

I've looked at a few lists. I think maybe War Horse will work. She was mostly interested in WWI anyway after seeing a gripping/realistic account of life in the trenches called Blackadder Goes Fourth. 

Or Das Boot. I remember seeing that at about her age. It must have been six hours long on TV with ad breaks.

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On 9/7/2023 at 5:38 AM, JonoBlade said:

Inexplicably my daughter has decided she likes war movies.

We watched "Dunkirk" the other day which she declared the greatest movie ever made (most recently held by Mary Poppins 2 and practically every other movie she sees until supplanted by the next).

Any recommendations sitting in the 12-13 age rating bracket? i.e. ideally not rated 15. 

Dunkirk was tastefully done. Didn't pull any punches but not too graphic. The soundtrack is pretty funny. Essentially the entire film is an ominous Hans Zimmer build up.

We'll probably watch Saving Private Ryan at the weekend, even though rated 15. I recall it has some pretty grisly scenes which might be a little too much but it is a classic.

Band of Brothers may also be approps.

We watched the trailer for Midway and it looked like a Marvel film - just too much action over substance. So any hollywoodified examples like Pearl Harbour are best avoided.

I watched Oppenheimer with my dad a month ago, he fell asleep somewhere in the middle, but I enjoyed it.

 

Das Boot might test a younger child's patience a little bit. There's a few other sub films out there that do a reasonable job of holding a younger audiences attention (U-571 springs to mind at the moment, but that one's not a classic by any means), but Das Boot is easily the current title holder in that genre. War films were frequently played in my house growing up so I can really only say what I enjoyed as a kid. If you want to go the classics route I'd steer you away from The Longest Day or anything directed by Mel Gibson (unless she already knows about how horrifically historically inaccurate his material can be). A Bridge Too Far actually holds up surprisingly well for being as old as it is.

If you're looking for premium popcorn value I'd say Enemy At The Gates is pretty decent. It depicts a part of WWII that isn't often depicted in U.S. Media and it keeps the entertainment value high by collapsing a lot of the larger scale of the conflict down to a fairly small insular set of characters with the sniper war angle. There were of course some liberties taken in terms of accuracy, but nothing unforgivable to me. Graphic content wise, it's kind of hard for me to judge these things since depictions of viscera and gore in war films are pretty par for the course, but what exactly crosses the line into excessive is just going to vary from parent to parent. I will give you a spoiler and warn that there is one child death in the movie, but it's not shown as it's happening and only revealed in silhouette. And there is one sex scene that's reasonably mild and nowhere near an R rating.

Other than that good luck man. I'm pretty sure there's a ton of dads out there that would fall over themselves backwards getting to the dvd case if their daughter randomly hit a war movie phase. The closest I and my siblings ever really got (since war movies were pretty much obligatory viewing as a matter of course) was when my sister and I both hit a random mob movie phase at roughly the exact same time.

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On 9/7/2023 at 8:38 PM, JonoBlade said:

Inexplicably my daughter has decided she likes war movies.

We watched "Dunkirk" the other day which she declared the greatest movie ever made (most recently held by Mary Poppins 2 and practically every other movie she sees until supplanted by the next).

.

 

Dunkirk is awesome.

There's always the old classics - Kelly's Heroes, Longest Day, A Bridge Too Far, Patton, Tora! Tora! Tora!, The Guns of Navaronne, Cross of Iron, Where Eagles Dare, Battle of the Bulge, Dirty Dozen, Bridge on the River Kwai.

 

Enemy At The Gates is Ok.  So is modern version of Sahara (1995 with James Belushi).  Platoon.  Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima are good too.

 

And Black Hawk Down - now there's a movie!  Definitely Saving Private Ryan and Band Of Brothers. Sniper and Hurtlocker are good too.

 

Tour of Duty was a great Vietnam War tv show.

I also enjoyed the new Rogue Heroes tv show  about the formation of the SAS and LRDG.

 

1 hour ago, Sardonicist said:

 

For me as a child Das Boot was amazing. 

Fury (2014) is a good one. 

 

Das Boot is awesome.

 

Fury is shit.  So much rubbed me the wrong way with that movie and the last scene is just the dumbest fucking thing ever filmed.

 

Oh and I like Cross of Iron - very gritty.  

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2 hours ago, Dead1 said:

Dunkirk is awesome.

And Black Hawk Down - now there's a movie!  Definitely Saving Private Ryan and Band Of Brothers. Sniper and Hurtlocker are good too.

Black Hawk down is probably the closest we're going to get to a happy medium between a realistic depiction of modern warfare and hollywood entertainment. Great movie.

I enjoyed The Hurt Locker as well, but it's super divisive even for people who were in that conflict in Iraq. I've talked to veterans on both sides of the issue there and it seems like about half of them fall on the side of "there is absolutely no way in hell they would ever let that guy be a bomb tech" and the other half say "People forget just how lax the recruiting standards were at that point. There were absolutely some lunatics who made it into combat situations with attitudes like that". Both sides agreed that he wouldn't have seen the full stretch of his tour though. You can't just play with the lives of your team members like that and not suffer some consequences at the hands of command or your team members themselves, so I don't really know. It's still worth a watch.

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I think this is relevant to a few observations of @Dead1 about Singapore.

Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones Documentary Explores Areas of the World Where More People Live Longer - Netflix Tudum

Apparently, Singapore is the happiest place on Earth (not Disneyland as they would have you believe) which is surprising for an Asian country where you'd have thought they were under high pressure to perform at school, at work etc.

What struck me about the last episode (I only watched the last episode because my wife flagged it) was that politicians in Singapore actually seem to implement policies that are best for their citizens, even if not popular to begin with. I was really shocked by that. The nerve of those people.

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7 hours ago, JonoBlade said:

I think this is relevant to a few observations of @Dead1 about Singapore.

Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones Documentary Explores Areas of the World Where More People Live Longer - Netflix Tudum

Apparently, Singapore is the happiest place on Earth (not Disneyland as they would have you believe) which is surprising for an Asian country where you'd have thought they were under high pressure to perform at school, at work etc.

What struck me about the last episode (I only watched the last episode because my wife flagged it) was that politicians in Singapore actually seem to implement policies that are best for their citizens, even if not popular to begin with. I was really shocked by that. The nerve of those people.

I have always maintained the world would be better if it was all run by Singapore and have joked that Australia should contract Singapore to run Australia.

 

It would mean compromising some of the excesses of freedom but then freedom in its current format is a fucking planet destroying disaster.

 

Anyhow watching:

Ashoka - Decent enough, not as good as Mandalorian S1&2 and certainly no Andor but still fun enough.

Superstition - Basically Supernatural but set in a southern town.  Mario Van Peebles is in it.  Fluff and occasionally a bit disjointed but still enjoyable. 

 

 

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