Flyingwoman

Gosford Park was also directed by Robert Altman, who was blessedly not in love with the time period and was therefore willing to have some subtle fun with it. If I did not know Fellowes was involved in both productions I would have pegged Downton as an expensive Gosford fan film, in which the fave characters got Mary Sue'd and everything turns out alright in the end. And that's fine. Goodness knows I enjoy me some happily-ever-after fan fic, but then my bar for stuff I read for free on the internet is lower than what I think a film production company's would be for a prestige product like this. Re Mad Men: There are still alot of people around who remember the 60s and know it wasn't all peace, love and understanding. If they had tried to sugar-coat the times there would have been push-back from people who could claim the authority of experience. Waaaaaaay back in the day, The Jewel in the Crown had 14 hours of period drama packed full of one mind-blowingly problematic character after another and it was riveting. However, like Mad Men, it was made within the lifetimes of people who had experienced those events. With Downton there are probably very few people left at this point with solid memories of the era, so there are probably very few people left to say "That's bunk and I would know."

I think nothing ever changes at Downton because it is escapist fantasy for Fellowes as much as as for the audience. I think a lot of the syrupy social anachronisms of the later seasons can be blamed on this - having Robert, or anyone, be truly upset that Edith is a single mother or that the second butler is gay would perhaps be more realistic, but it would destroy the fairy-tale. Ditto Mary's character development - she doesn't need to grow because she epitomizes Downton, and Downton is already perfect. And of course the schoolteacher Branson flirted with had to be the plainest, most unpleasant person possible, because anyone suggesting the system on which Downton was built needed to change is by definition a kill-joy and is possibly lacking a soul. Of course, that the system has indeed changed is the reality from which I believe Fellowes is trying so hard to flee.

I am finally (!!!!) finished with S1 (through 2 x 3). I'm not finding it a marathon-able show, and I'm not sure why, other than that 21 episodes seems like a loooooong season in 2019. General thoughts: - That car really needed a new muffler. Thankfully Dean seems to have replaced the exhaust system when he replaced just about everything else - It really is a basket of horror-movie cliches at this point - which is about 75% of the fun, but also means nothing is especially scary. Except for Home, of course. And that clown in S2. Sam is correct to be afraid of clowns. (Maybe if they work in more bears, cold, and showing up to finals without having attended any classes that semester it'll be more frightening?). - They do a good job of using their A-plots to illuminate the family dynamic. Home and Something Wicked This Way Comes do this obviously, but I thought Hell House and The Benders were good funhouse-mirrors on them too. - Speaking of which, I don't know what annoyed me more about The Benders: the Netflix description, which promised 'vanishing into thin air' and completely failed to deliver; that Ernest T. Bass moved north from Mayberry sometime in the last 50 years and took up serial killing, which is the only explanation I can think of for that over-the-top Appalachian hill-billy accent showing up here in MN; or that said hill-billy was trying to kill our heroes when there was a demon to be smoked. - And speaking of smoke, I get why the CW would not want to show characters smoking, but the fact that Dean and especially John don't seems wrong. With what they do you would think they would be doing a little more self-medicating. I kept expecting both of them to light up and it was a bit surreal that they never did. - And speaking of John, I thought the narrative really picked up in the last few episodes when he showed up. Partially because it was the culmination of the seasons's quest, but also because of the way it shifted the brothers' relationship. Prior to that I was mostly on Sam's side during whatever arguments they had, but watching him and John go at it made me realize how little oxygen Dean had likely had to breathe once Sam hit puberty. It was a little shocking him watching him go from being sort of desperately dominant to being the peace-maker in the room. Otoh, I could also see why Sam would fight his father tooth-and-nail. He doesn't have Dean's trauma or Dean's burden, but that gives him the clarity to see that John was too dysfunctional to parent well, and fighting that was probably the healthiest thing he could do. I'm a little bummed that we won't get to see John's perspective on his wife's death (and if we do, don't tell me!!!), because it would be interesting, if horrifying, to see him transform from suburban dad to demon Hunter.

Here's yet another GOT rant, some of which I agree with and some of which I don't, and some of which I thought could be equally applied to Smallville, especially this section: Benioff and Weiss’s prescriptive approach to storytelling is exactly what transformative fandom runs counter to, and it plays into the specific problem that plagued the show throughout its final season: the conflict between natural character progressions and the bulleted checklist of plot points that Benioff and Weiss seemingly felt obligated to deliver. ... Benioff and Weiss fell back on plot and spectacle and callbacks, even when it meant characters contradicted themselves or acted in highly inconsistent ways. The effect was that they wound up regurgitating George R.R. Martin’s plot directions without any deeper thought for what it would do to the characters. Of course, having said that, I have to wonder how much to the character-development problem was created by the "transformative" nature of the core Smallville concept, which was that Clark Kent didn't want to grow up to be Superman, trying to fill a "curatorial" role by explaining how he came to do that anyway.

I am pro this idea. I think the Nielsen/Tiedemann feud is central to this conflict, the Tiedemann's (Claudia at least) seem more inclined to long-term planning than the impulsive Nielsen's, and for a show that seems to be very careful about matching the younger actors to the older, it seems odd to cast an actor as an older version of Jonas whose head shape is absolutely nothing like the younger version's, so I am down with the that Bartosz has constructed an elaborate super-villian scheme to get back at his childhood bff. I am okay with the idea of characters creating their own problems, but I swear this lot gets up every morning and asks themselves how they can maximize their dysfunction that day. Probable-murderer/spy/wtf Aleksander is the only one who has managed to adult, likely because he wasn't raised by any of the drama-royalty of Winden. (To be fair, the Wöller siblings seem fairly chill, but we also know very little about them. They seem to be leaving us deliberately in the dark about them. That scene in which we almost find out what happened to Torben's eye was some first-class trolling.)

Thanks for all the feedback! It sounds as if the consensus is that there is some good stuff through S10, unless I happen to really become invested in Sam, in which case be careful with seasons 8 & 9. Don't know if I will get that far. I'm only Midway through S1 right now; ended up getting side-tracked with a Deadwood re-watch before seeing the movie (but I am now anxious to see Jim Beaver! I'm re-mouring Ellsworth and his wedding gloves right now.). I think the interplay of the brothers is more interesting to watch than either of them would be as a stand-alone character; they seem designed to both compliment and antagonize each other. Without that you'd need to introduce a bigger cast for one or the other to play off - although it sounds as if that might happen in the later seasons? As for the rest, I'd say: road trip, horror movie*, humor, Americana. I appreciate the emotional drama in that the show seems to be grounding itself in their personal and family tragedies - it gives the characters motivation and me a reason to care - but I appreciate more that they haven't (yet?) eaten up a lot of time with that. *Although... the only episode I've found frightening so far has been Home. Incidentally that's the ep that has had the most development of the family-secrets plot. If they continue like that, I'll probably enjoy the back-story more.

I have an incredible urge to hug all the dazed and enraged GOT fans out there, whispering: "Oh, you sweet summer children. You never saw Superman try to persuade his pregnant ex-girlfriend to run away with him on the day of her wedding to the baby's father, did you? I'd like to tell you it gets better, that someday youll stop seeing throw-away, garbage tweets with more thoughtful S8 plot outlines than anything D&D could have constructed, and it'll all just seem like a bad, slightly paranoid dream. Really, it will. For awhile. Until the next lazy show-runner decides to half-ass their way to a series conclusion, and it'll all come roaring back." That said, Clark taking down the missile in Hidden was Smallville at it's finest for me. Yes, there were some plotholes in the episode (because it was, after all, Smallville), but that was the closest I thought Clark came to Superman. I was kind of on a high from that all the way through Justice in S6. To crib off one of a zillion post-GOT memes: Wasn't it great that Smallville ended with the formation of the Justice League, all of them working together to defeat a Luthor scheme that stretched, in one form or another, all the way back to Season 1? Imagine all the great stuff they'll do in the future!

So I decided to start watching Supernatural this weekend. Could never quite get into it before but I thought it's ending this year, maybe I should see what the fuss was about. I don't think I'm gonna be able to marathon through 14 seasons, but I'm wondering if there's a list of essential eps or if there's a point after which it's not worth bothering?

Thanks for the rec. Lots of good stuff there. He's got info on guest stars & characters from the Superman mythos, good critiques of the shows terrible timelines, the product placement (!!! I almost caused a car accident laughing at his admission that he used Old Spice Red Zone for years because it was featured in Jinx) and where episodes succeeded and where they failed.

In other news, there's an 80th anniversary special Superman Hollywood Spotlight Collector's Edition at my supermarket. I flipped through to see if there was any SV-related material, and the answer was "not much". There was a photo of Clark and Bo Kent, one of Lana, one of Clark and Lana (captioned to comment that she wasn't a red-head), one of Clark, Lex and Shelby (caption was about Superman's dog Krypto)... And one each of SV!Metallo and the SV!Legion. I'm assuming there have been no other live-action appearances of those characters? There was one photo of Annette O'Toole from Superman 3, but none from SV, which I found surprising; I would have thought they'd have emphasized that she'd been in two Superman properties. Theshow got two paragraphs in the article on Superman on t.v., which was mostly about The Adventures of Superman and Lois & Clark, which both probably had wider viewership when they aired. Article did give it props for being the best Superman show and emphasized it's role in paving the way for the slate of super-hero shows we now have. Interesting take on what legacy the show has almost a decade later.

A third option is that many people struggle with confronting authority, as the original Milgram experiment and subsequent attempts to replicate have shown. What's of particular interest to me in the linked discussion is that some participants who actively protested the experiment still increased the voltage up to 450, which indicates to me how complicated responses can be. We may think that our moral fiber is tough enough to withstand social pressure, but research indicates that even those of us who are not brainwashed and haven't already invested a huge amount of our emotional well-being in receiving the approval of a psychopath may be willing to cause others pain* if told to do so by someone we perceive as a legitimate authority figure. That said, I agree about Tom Cruise. Husband was on his own when he went to the latest Mission Impossible. *or laser-graffiti all over the city and just generally douche around for an entire season

Unpopular opinion: for a show that was pretty much all about romance (with a side helping of mystery and historical drama), Downton Abbey had the worst relationships. Fellowes just did not seem to know how to put together two people who would be good for one another in an entertaining way. He either paired people who were too nice for this world (Anna, Matthew, Mrs. Hughes) with people who varied from the merely awful to utter wastes of oxygen (Bates, Mary, Carson), OR he turned the love of two likable souls into complete snoozefests (Sybil &Tom, Mosley & Baxter, Atticus & Rose). The only couples to escape both curses (an opinion based purely on the fact that I didn't hate one of the parties involved and can remember most of what happened to them) were Isobel & Lord Merton and Edith & Gregson, and I'm not 100% on the latter - he was certainly good for her, but I'm not sure she was good for him, other than not being Not Crazy. Aside from those two, the only other ship on this show that I really enjoyed was Mary & Carlisle. Fellowes really excels at writing assholes, and when he put two of them together it made, in my opinion, for the most exciting season of the show. I was sorely, sorely disappointed that we didn't get a season 3 pitting the Carlisles against the Crawleys; I would have loved seeing the sparks fly between them when Mary eventually decided to ditch him for her family, and the intrigue when Bates was eventually accused of his murder, only to be cleared through the investigative talents of Tom, Barrow and Violet. Sadly, we got the miraculous healing of Matthew, the death of Lavina, and the stupid inheritance dilemma instead.

Well, now that we've proved Godwin's Law works, I think the appropriate Hitler parallel is to his oratory, as in: Hitler's genocidal mania did not negate his ability to rile a crowd, but rather his ability to rile a crowd made him more effective at instigating global war and ordering the deaths of millions of people. Please note that I am NOT saying that being good at something makes someone righteous. I am just saying that talent and sin can co-exist.

I don't think anyone here is saying Allison shouldn't be prosecuted for her crimes. If anything, this incident illustrates that women can occupy spaces on both sides of #metoo, as victims and perpetrators. However, AM's violence and willingness to exploit other women doesn't negate her talent. The world isn't that simple. If anything, I think AM's charisma and acting ability probably made her a more effective Number One to Raniere, scary as that is. On the subject of #metoo, the analogy that comes closest in my mind is the Cosby case. I grew up listening to his albums and watching The Cosby Show, and when the accusations first began to gain steam I was devastated. There were so many of them I couldn't doubt that they were true, but ... this was America's Dad. It was horrible to think he had a monster inside him. Horrible because he was (and hell, probably still is), a very funny, very talented performer.

I read some of her blog after season 8 or 9 ended - and she was writing about having made a commitment to do something really out of her comfort zone and how scary that was, and also that she was eating a lot to cope - which was making her more stressed. It was right before she worked on "Marilyn" and so at the time I thought it might have been about accepting that role, and general industry pressure to keep weight down . Now I wonder if it was cult-related, particularly the anxiety around her eating.