What are you watching?

[Volkonski]

Finished "The Umbrella Academy" today. Before it was over 2 more previously dead characters were alive again. Some series 3 characters died and came back from the dead, one more than once.

I doubt there will be a fourth series. There was no cliffhanger.

[Phoenix520]

The Man Who Fell to Earth, the series. It has humor and science and Chiwetel Ejiofor . He’s become one of my favorite actors. His face is quite expressively rubbery turning from alien to human.

[bill_g]

"The Mentalist" on the Roku Channel.

We enjoyed it years ago on regular teevee. Then the series ended but didn't seem to enjoy any rerun time on TNT/TBS/USA or Netflix. It simply diskappeared. Poof. Gone. Finito. A few weeks ago Mrs started exploring some of the other channels on the Roku, and found it on The Roku Channel. Who knew there wasn't enough content carriers out there - that Roku had to fill a void? Lo and Behold "The Mentalist" showed up in their list. Well, looky there. So, we've been savoring it one episode a night together effectively giving us almost a year of enjoyment.

Yes - Roku inserts commercials, and they do a hack job. They don't use the normal breaks built into the show. They abruptly switch to commercial for 30 to 90 seconds, and then return you to five seconds prior to the break. You don't miss anything, but it took some getting used to. However, FF works. You can skip the commercials if you are quick on the draw when the show returns. I'm not that coordinated.

Personally I like what Roku has to offer over Peacock.

[Slim Cognito]

Gaslit. Untold story about Martha Mitchell as the first truth teller about Watergate. She was literally beaten up, gaslighted, and stigmatized as drunk and mentally ill. Julia Roberts is excellent as Martha and Sean Penn loathsome as John Mitchell. But in my opinion, the actor playing G. Gordon Liddy is fantastic and totally captures his howling psychotic insanity.

Yes to everything you said.

But to be fair, she WAS a drunk, and, though I am not a shrink, she probably was mentally ill during some of the more critical events - pushed there by the gaslighting and torture.

Women who were gaslighted, abused and tortured at the time often anesthetized themselves with pills and alcohol. And still do.

Just started watching. I'm only on episode 3 but holy crap! The first I'd heard of Martha Mitchell's mistreatment was on Drunk History. I'm glad to see it going mainstream.

And Sean Penn is unrecognizable in his makeup, but really good.

[bill_g]

Are you tired of smart thrillers that have you on the edge of your seat? Do you long for a formulaic tale that you can almost mouth the words on the first viewing? Do you want well defined good guys and bad guys that are easy to tell apart? Does the story need a girl and 35000 people in mortal danger wrapped in an ethical dilemma? Must the hero suffer impossible wounds and still have a one handed shoot out on a motorcycle?

Then feed your desire for simple, predictable, and specious. Watch Final Score on Netflix streaming. You've seen it before with different actors and a slightly different story, in a different location with completely different accents. But, this is different. Kind of.

[Tiredretiredlawyer]

https://www.investigationdiscovery.com/ ... able-cases

Inside ‘Homicide Hunter’ Joe Kenda’s Most Memorable Cases
The veteran lieutenant has investigated everything from a man who choked to death on his own eyeball to a woman whose death he believes was staged to look like suicide.

American Detective, his latest venture, features cases from investigators across the country. Homicide Hunter, which debuted its ninth and final season in 2019, digs into Kenda’s case files and showcases the law enforcement veteran’s most memorable investigations.

Eye of the Beholder

On July 3, 1986, a security guard patrolling a vacant office park on the east side of Colorado Springs found a woman covered in blood sitting next to a dead man who appeared to have been bleeding.

Joe Kenda was called to the scene, where he attempted to speak with the dazed female, Grace Todd. “This girl is falling down drunk, hopeless, drunk,” the lieutenant recalls. “She has many things I want to know, but she’s in no position to tell me.”

While Grace, 25, is sobering up, Kenda tries to figure out how the man died, but he doesn’t observe any visible wounds. “I’m looking at his face. I look at his eye sockets. The orbits around the eyes just look odd to me,” he says.

The reason? Both of the man’s eyeballs were gone.

“I look at his mouth and it doesn’t look right either,” Kenda says. “His lips are kind of protruding, so I pull his lower lip back. There’s an eyeball in his mouth, and it’s looking at me.”

Kenda then learned about Jeff Kelly, a key witness who described to detectives how a woman matching Grace’s description knocked on his door and asked for a phone, telling him she just killed somebody.

According to Kenda, Grace initially denied she had anything to do with Cave’s death but cracked when he told her she was under arrest for murder.

► Show Spoiler

“She said, ‘Okay, I poked his eyes out, because he tried to get in my pants!’” Kenda says of Grace, who attacked Cave and used her thumbs and index fingers to pull his eyes out of his head.

A coroner determined Cave died from choking to death on one of his eyeballs. “So, the murder weapon is a blue eye,” Kenda says, calling the homicide “another first.”

[RVInit]

A drunk woman was able to overpower a man enough to not only poke both of his eyeballs out, but also stuff them (or one of them) into this mouth?

Wow. I'm kind of impressed. Sickened. But impressed.

[raison de arizona]

I watched a mockumentary called "The History of Time Travel." I won't give away the twist, but it is neatly done. Free on Amazon Prime, dunno where else.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3727120/

[AndyinPA]

Watched Night Sky on Prime. Slow, but got more interesting. However, not taken up for second season.

[Flatpoint High]

Binging STRANGER THINGS

[bill_g]

Netflix's Keep Breathing

Christina Escobar on Roger Ebert dot com calls it preposterous.

The critics at Rotten Tomatoes were merciless.

Even Forbes panned it.

I understand all their complaints, and even agree a bit. Christina's arguments were particularly insightful for me. I did find myself yelling at the screen a number of times for the very reasons they complained about. But!

Overall I found the story compelling, and it's one of the few shows I have ever binged. I generally don't want to sit that long. However, with the temps above 100F by early afternoon, the great indoor sport of watching TeeVee in an air conditioned house becomes a good choice. And with six episodes around a half hour each, it becomes a six hour movie with extended breaks when you want one. We got 'er dun by 2130.

YMMV but I give it a thumbs up for story concept and acting, and a thumbs down for length and execution.

Enjoy!

[Luke]

Yikes! The Future Is Here!

OrlyLicious @Orly_licious 55s
The Jetsons premiered in 1962 and #GeorgeJetson's birthday is July 31, 2022! Can you believe it? We all made it to the era of #TheJetsons! A Jetson-Like Air Taxi is envisioned by Uber within 10 years. The Future, here we are!

[Slim Cognito]

Was surfing through Disney Plus and found a show on National Geographic called The Science of Stupid. I know all the engineers here are way ahead of me, but all those funniest home videos we've snorted through all these years, they explain why those guys ended ass-up in a garbage can.

I found the show after watching another NG about ancient cities. Tonight I watched how the amazing people of Petra didn't just carve those incredible buildings into mountains, they engineered dry desert into lush farmland by damming far off rain runoff and channeling the water and sediment into the completely waterless region...2,000 years ago.

Then I come back here and see The American People's Convoy's Protest thread.

[Foggy]

Then I come back here and see The American People's Convoy's Protest thread.

Makes ya proud to be a American, I tells ya.

So did the amazing people of Petra have toilet paper on a roll? Did they have cell phones and Cabbage Patch dolls?

[bill_g]

The Stranger on Netflix Instant.

8 episode limited series convoluted murder mystery, and they actually manage to put a bow on it without wrecking the threads of the tapestry they wove.

[neonzx]

"Carter" on Netflix -- it's a 2022 movie out of S. Korea and kinda interesting. It's Sci-fi-ishy and mysterious action flick. I'm not done with it ... it's a 2+ hour film, not a series.

As usual for a Netflix underwritten production, dubbed and subtitled in multiple languages.

[Danraft]

Thanks for the Carter suggestion—. I just checked it out and it will be watched when I get some time.

First observation is that there is stunning camera work with long continuous shots (or spliced together with carefully used transitions) that direct one’s attention and are a visual feast.

[Kriselda Gray]

My husband and I watched the first two episodes of The Sandman a couple days ago and it's extremely good. I have a tendency to divide my attention when watching TV - it's hard for me to just sit there and let whatever's on the TV just flow into my head, but with Sandman I couldn't do anything else, it was mesmerizing. The acting is great, the story (so far) has that great mysterious feel to it without it being too confusing, the sets are gorgeous (!!!) and even the music is excellent. It's well worth checking out

[Mrich]

I got a free month of Hulu so I've been watching The Orville. Then I just found out that The Orville is now on Disney+, which I already have, so I don't want to "waste" my month finishing up the Orville. Any suggestions for something on Hulu? I don't want to watch anything depressing like "The Handmaid's Tale". Is "Only Murders In the Building" any good?

[neonzx]

Thanks for the Carter suggestion—. I just checked it out and it will be watched when I get some time.

First observation is that there is stunning camera work with long continuous shots (or spliced together with carefully used transitions) that direct one’s attention and are a visual feast.

I say it was way much more than cameras or splicing. (there would be many dead actors and extras otherwise)
A lot of computer CPU cycles were expended on the making of this film. But it is done well. I'm watching the rest this afternoon.

[Slim Cognito]

Just watched a fascinating doc about the King In The Car Park (Richard III). This is the second one I've watched but this one is narrated by comedian/actor Simon Farnaby (of Horrible Histories and Ghost) and he's a fav of mine. (The whole crew of HH are favs of mine. Most of them now star in Ghost, the original British version. Natch, the US version is watered down. They eventually found an innocent reason for why the ghost of the dead US businessman wore no pants, the very part played, quite randily, by Farnaby.)

I don't want to spoil it, just find a video about it and watch. I think there are several, including youtube.

[neonzx]

"The Pizzagate Massacre" on Amazon Prime. Funny , dark satire film based around you know what.

[bill_g]

News of the World on Netflix disc.

It's a western starring Tom Hanks. His character is a former Confederate officer that travels far and wide by horseback in post Civil War Texas (1870) to read the recent news to the public for coins in a cup. I have no idea if that was a common avocation in the day or not, but I can imagine there was a calling for such a thing. As a traveler in an unended world, he faces many adversities. At face value, it is an interesting story worth watching.

We see Hanks as a mature actor still in his prime. He is not a super hero. His bullets don't all strike home perfectly. He doesn't immediately recover from an injury. He isn't faster or smarter or more skilled. He plays a real person which is refreshing. We do get a reprise of his role in Saving Private Ryan. He is unflappable. He is certain, and courageous. He is someone to be admired. In many ways this is Tom Hanks playing John Wayne, and this is his True Grit.

But, I sensed a subtext here. Hanks is a big enough star to choose his own stories, and I think he wanted to present a bit of revisionist history with this. He wanted to paint a favorable image for Texans in general and an unfavorable one for the Northern occupational Army. But, without a lot of research on my part, all I can do is speculate there was more story he was trying to tell than a man reading newspapers in barns.

This movie distinctly falls into the YMMV category. It's fiction presented as a possible truth.

[SuzieC]

The new 8-episode series A League of Their Own on Amazon Prime. It is based upon the 1992 film, but is much more diverse and has prominent LGBT themes. Abbi Jacobson from Broad City heads the cast. She is terrific.

[neonzx]

The new 8-episode series A League of Their Own on Amazon Prime. It is based upon the 1992 film, but is much more diverse and has prominent LGBT themes. Abbi Jacobson from Broad City heads the cast. She is terrific.

OH, I saw that pop-up and I thought they were putting up the original. I generally do not like "reboots" (don't fuck with perfect) but I think I will give it a go on this one.