Oh shit.
Oh shit.
Hell to the yes. Only concern is I wish it was a movie instead of show, but we'll see.
Super thrilled!!!!
[+] closer to next rating / [-] closer to previous rating
- Dark (S3) ✦✦✦½ [-]
- Fall (Mann, 2022) ✦✦✦½ [-]
- Ms. Marvel (S1) ✦½ [+]
- Dark (S2) ✦✦✦✦
- Moon Knight (S1) ✦✦½ [-]
- Get Carter (Hodges, 1971) ✦✦✦½ [+]
- Prey (Trachtenberg, 2022) ✦✦✦ [-]
- Black Bird (S1) ✦✦✦✦
- Better Call Saul (S6) ✦✦✦½ [+]
- Halo (S1) ✦✦✦ [-]
- Slow Horses (S1) ✦✦✦½ [+]
- H4Z4RD (Govaerts, 2022/BE) ✦✦½ [-]
- Gangs of London (S1) ✦✦✦½ [+]
- We Own This City (S1) ✦✦✦½ [+]
- Thor: Love and Thunder (Waititi, 2022) ✦✦ [+]
These trailers have been so stunning that I'm worried that at this point it can only disappoint.
Which is just my way of trying to lower my extremely high anticipation and expectations to be excited all over again when it's (hopefully) excellent.
Last 11 things I really enjoyed:
Speed Racer (Wachowski/Wachowski, 2008)
Safe (Haynes, 1995)
South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (Parker, 1999)
Beastie Boys Story (Jonze, 2020)
Bad Trip (Sakurai, 2020)
What's Up Doc? (Bogdanovich, 1972)
Diva (Beineix, 1981)
Delicatessen (Caro/Jeunet, 1991)
The Hunger (Scott, 1983)
Pineapple Express (Green, 2008)
Chungking Express (Wong, 1994)
I've only seen a few quick glimpses of this show via commercials — trying to avoid spoilers — so I don't know much about it besides the writers, the cast, and some superficial awareness of the source material. I haven't been a fan of what I've seen of Jonathan Nolan's work, but perhaps he'll be surprise me now that he's not collaborating with his brother. Michelle McLaren will be directing an episode, apparently. That's good news.
This is an interesting discussion from a recent interview:
Last edited by Gittes; 10-03-2016 at 03:15 AM.
Can't wait.
Didn't expect this to be the same continuity as the movie! Unless those are just Easter eggs.
Movie Theater DiaryQuoting Donald Glover
Loved the first episode. Usually I don't like shows right off the bat. Last time that happened was... Sopranos?
I haven't seen the movie, should I?
I don't think it's required. But it's a good movie, so worth watching in that respect.Quoting Dukefrukem (view post)
Just watched it last night for the first time. It is eminently skippable. It takes an interesting premise and basically goes nowhere with it; it halfway begins building a world (with a lot of half-arsed explanations that don't really make sense) and then just jettisons everything for a one-on-one chase through random sets.Quoting Dukefrukem (view post)
Last edited by transmogrifier; 10-04-2016 at 12:16 AM.
Last 10 Movies Seen
(90+ = canonical, 80-89 = brilliant, 70-79 = strongly recommended, 60-69 = good, 50-59 = mixed, 40-49 = below average with some good points, 30-39 = poor, 20-29 = bad, 10-19 = terrible, 0-9 = soul-crushingly inept in every way)
Run (2020) 64
The Whistlers (2019) 55
Pawn (2020) 62
Matilda (1996) 37
The Town that Dreaded Sundown (1976) 61
Moby Dick (2011) 50
Soul (2020) 64
Heroic Duo (2003) 55
A Moment of Romance (1990) 61
As Tears Go By (1988) 65
Stuff at Letterboxd
Listening Habits at LastFM
Ha. On the Westworld site, you can chat with a host.
I found out that if you gamble in Sweetwater, whatever you win, you can use throughout. Gonna need that money if it's $40k a day!
The Man in Black won't be revealed, but sneak that he is a "VIP."
No "outside weapons" are allowed.
ASK THE HOST WHERE IT WAS BORN.
https://www.discoverwestworld.com/
ALSO, type TEST in the top right.
I liked this because it touched on ideas I find interesting, but ...
- The original movie labored to explain its premise, to the point of repetitiveness. The show doesn't explain much. I wonder how that played to someone who hasn't seen the movie and didn't watch every promo HBO released. Did it make sense?
- I liked Ed Harris' character because he represents something often forgotten in set-ups like this: The PK or griefer, the guest who comes to the park and says, "fuck it, ima kill everybody." I mean, the movie never went near this idea. It played to the fantasy that everything was allowable, while assuming every player will roleplay their part correctly. Like, no guest at Westworld creeps around in a ninja costume and sets fire to all the buildings for the hell of it. Nobody decides to pay the money and become a saloon whore for a week, taking on all comers, robot or human.
- I think this premise, at least so far, makes the same fundamental mistake that bad interpretations of Blade Runner do--robot versus robot isn't dramatically interesting. And the robots of Westworld are more limited. They don't even have a complete model of their world. They're just past being Abe Lincoln in the Hall of Presidents or the Country Bear Jamboree. They're far enough from human to be creepy by not close enough to be relatable.
- Every scene was meta, meta, meta. The show screams its premise with every shot. And each time they cut away to the control rooms and labs, it undercut any stakes in the park. They went for an hour and what was the story here? I hope the rest of the episodes aren't so formless.
- The movie very briefly addressed the idea that the guests can't tell the difference between the robots and other guests. I'm waiting for the show to do something similar. What happens when a guess assaults or kills another guest, because they thought they were fighting a robot?
- My fear is that this'll be another show that jerks around the audience by constantly teasing some end result that can never actually happen. In this case, a robot uprising.
By the way, my biggest question is why keep the defective androids all in one terrifying room? That was freaky.Quoting Irish (view post)
There's definitely more than ten guests. The writer dude said they couldn't pull hosts out at once because there were something like "1400" active scenarios in play. My favorite throwaway detail is when the family with the kid said they're crossing into the "adult" side of Westworld. I love the idea that there are Peckinpah sections and Bonanza sections of the park.
Personally, I'm really interested to see how the show would explore racism.
Movie Theater DiaryQuoting Donald Glover
Well, that's me — I haven't seen the movie, saw only snippets of commercials, and read only one interview answer. It was pretty clear. I was able to predict that James Marsden was a robot before the reveal, but I guess that was fairly obvious. I didn't realize this was basically an amusement park for the id, though. I had heard it was "Jurassic Park but with robots," so I thought it was about witnessing the spectacle of advanced AI. That quote I shared earlier talks about how technology facilitates, or provides an avenue for, odious behaviour but I didn't think that this was actually going to be the express purpose of the place.Quoting Irish (view post)
Technically, I guess the idea is that it allows people to play a live-action RPG, but everyone seems to be aware that many attendees aren't going there to simply fulfill the anodyne parts of the scripted experiences. Also, opportunities for illicit behaviour are deliberately woven into the narratives being provided by management. So, it seems like the people running the park don't really care about guests deviating from the script. One can either be a "griefer," as you put it, or find a criminal outlet within the actual stories. Either way, it's that outlet that they're knowingly selling — at least to one (sizeable?) section of their clientele, anyway.
I got the opposite sense, but it's a distinct possibility that I'll be wrong. I actually expect the show to deliver on this eventually. It will probably take a few seasons, but I think we're going to see the scales tipped significantly and the show will undergo some kind of paradigm shift and begin to feel like something else. Hopkins' line about humanity being finished, and Wood swatting the fly, lays down a very clear foundation. That struck me as legitimate foreshadowing, rather than a deceptive promise that will have to be deferred. At the very least, I expect the management and the park itself to be totally undone at some point, and, after that, the paradigm shift will involve the robots seamlessly integrating themselves into society. If that's how things play out, I expect the drama will focus on competing ideologies between the robots who want to blend in and those whose thirst for vengeance isn't quenched. On the surface, this sounds kind of cliche, but I'm assuming there will be lots of interesting wrinkles and complexities thrown in.
I think it's clear that this will change pretty dramatically as the show unfolds. The reverie update is one notch in that direction, and that will provide a lot of opportunities for making the robots seem more sophisticated and thoughtful. That first sign of rebellion at the very end is a miniature example of the way the development will play out — incremental steps toward autonomy and agency, etc.
Last edited by Gittes; 10-03-2016 at 07:10 PM.
Talk about meta: apparently the writers refer to the park management characters as "the showrunner level."
Movie Theater DiaryQuoting Donald Glover
The show seems to be heavily influenced by Cabin in the Woods.Quoting number8 (view post)
Last edited by Winston*; 10-04-2016 at 09:58 AM.
I think Irish's breakdown is pretty spot-on. I also wondered how the players avoid shooting each other, although I imagine they'll cover that eventually.
The only thing I would add is that this show sorely needs a sense of humor. Everything was so deadly serious and the show felt stilted because of it. I'd like to see the actors relax into the characters a little bit more, as opposed to everything being slavishly in service of communicating the premise. It feels that they are in danger of falling into the trap of exploring artificial life and forgetting what actual humanity looks like.
Still, I'll be watching more.
Coming to America (Landis, 1988) **
The Beach Bum (Korine, 2019) *1/2
Us (Peele, 2019) ***1/2
Fugue (Smoczynska, 2018) ***1/2
Prisoners (Villeneuve, 2013) ***1/2
Shadow (Zhang, 2018) ***
Oslo, August 31st (J. Trier, 2011) ****
Climax (Noé, 2018) **1/2
Fighting With My Family (Merchant, 2019) **
Upstream Color (Carruth, 2013) ***
In the movie the guests aren't given real six-shooters. They're high-tech weapons with temperature detectors that make them only work on inanimate objects. But this was always an incredibly flimsy explanation that I don't think Crichton ever thought completely through. He never explained how guests are supposed to not get hurt when they get into drunken saloon brawls, or how the swords work in Medieval World, or why they would possibly give the robots real guns that can harm guests. It really didn't make any sense. The part where Marsten could shoot Ed Harris but not wound him raised some questions, but it was already more base-covering than the movie ever did.Quoting Spinal (view post)
Movie Theater DiaryQuoting Donald Glover
Definitely agree with this. Found its humourlessness especially noticeable because I've been re-watching Deadwood lately, which has multiple laugh out loud moments per episode. In this I couldn't even see an attempt at a joke.Quoting Spinal (view post)
The premise of the show strikes me as absurd in about 15 different ways. But I'm willing to give the writers the benefit of the doubt that they have considered the parameters of the world they've created at least as much as I have after watching one episode four beers in on a Tuesday night. Interested to see what the world's like outside of the simulation.
Anyway, I mostly like the premiere and I can see the potential. I mean, I wasn't fond of every single decision in the whole hour, but, for the most part, it did strike me as being a really finessed, carefully presented episode. I rather liked the sense of just being dropped into the park, figuring things out, getting a sense of the dynamic between the characters, teases of the bigger picture, etc.
One of the exceptions to that finesse is the way the editing was a little awkward near the beginning of the episode. There were shots that felt like they needed to breathe for a moment or two more, but they ended up cutting away much quicker than I expected. Also, some of those sweeping, extreme long shots of the surrounding vista felt off somehow — something about the sudden reaches for geographical scope and wonder came across as kind of inorganic and half-baked.
The part of the story involving Wood's father being perplexed by that photograph was just tremendous, though. Wood's programmed response — "that doesn't look like anything to me" — was haunting. Evan Rachel Wood knocked that line out of the...park. That whole exchange was enveloped in these really eerie and tragic vibes, and that was amplified further when you see that he stayed up all night studying this picture, and actually managed to arrive at this troubling, insane revelation about his own existence. It was certainly one of the most unsettling and well-executed moments in the episode.
Last edited by Gittes; 10-03-2016 at 06:54 PM.
I liked all your points, but this one struck me -- even something like Nolan's Person of Interest started out as a fairly grounded procedural, though. It was The Equalizer with a techno twist. They didn't layer in the super-freaky AI-to-human convergence stuff until they were a few seasons in (50+ eps).Quoting Ezee E (view post)
This is one of my biggest pet peeves with almost all prestige cable dramas. Even under dire circumstance (like The Walking Dead), people would develop a certain gallows humor and crack jokes. But nobody ever does on these shows. Maybe the producers are afraid that if anybody in the audience laughs, they'll take the premises less seriously.Quoting Spinal (view post)
They can't, because the show would effectively be over at that point. I'd expect a tease to lead to resolution in a feature film, but TV is a more narratively conservative medium. If they tease out a big plot point and actually resolve it, the audience might leave (or at least that's the fear).Quoting Gittes (view post)
I can't think of too many shows that survived huge paradigm shifts half way through their runs.
But why would the audience stick around and wait for them to become autonomous? I wanna care about the character now, not 5 or 10 episodes from now.
The weakness of the pilot, to me, was that it put all its faith in the premise and not in characters or story. That's a huge red flag.
I liked that exchange too, but it's also part of what I meant about models. The Wood character doesn't have a mental model that allows her to speculate about anything in her world. She's working off a script and only mimics human responses. "That doesn't look like anything to me" sounds like a natural language processing version of "syntax error" or "command not found." She's like a 3-D version Alexa or Siri, unable to react extemporaneously.Quoting Gittes (view post)
I guess that's okay for a concept in a short story but it sure doesn't make for a very compelling character, or even a hook for a series.
Oh, one more fear: That they will pull some Battlestar Galactica bullshit and one or more "people" in the control center and labs (like Jeffrey Wright) will turn out to be androids.
Quoting Irish (view post)
Coming to America (Landis, 1988) **
The Beach Bum (Korine, 2019) *1/2
Us (Peele, 2019) ***1/2
Fugue (Smoczynska, 2018) ***1/2
Prisoners (Villeneuve, 2013) ***1/2
Shadow (Zhang, 2018) ***
Oslo, August 31st (J. Trier, 2011) ****
Climax (Noé, 2018) **1/2
Fighting With My Family (Merchant, 2019) **
Upstream Color (Carruth, 2013) ***