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Amazon Prime streaming video recommendations thread

It looks dreadful. TV mystery/thriller/ murder drama has jumped the shark.

Pretty much every one I've watched recently has been formulaic twaddle. I'm looking at you "The Light in the Hall" and "The House Across the Street".

I also have no idea why I gave "Rosie Malloy Gives Up Everything " houseroom either. That was absolute unmitigated shite.

But I digress....none of this is on Prime.

I gave The Rig a go because of some of the posts on here, but sci-fi/horror is a genre I usually studiously avoid. I won’t be doing it again.
 
As I originally said, first episode really drags you in and then it goes to shit. Too many unexplained plot chasms even for me and I can ignore a lot
Oh I'm definitely not going to argue that it's great. But I've seen so much stuff that's outright crap recently that it stuck out (to me, at least) as being middling fare.
Edit: Though it was disappointing to see Mark Bonnar written out so quickly. I like him.
 
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I would not recommend anyone to watch the Rig. It was tolerable, but not a good use of six hours. Particularly stay away if you don't like the idea of characters explaining the plot in gobbledegook science.
 
The trailer looked absolutely shite to me, like one of those cringeworthy Sky in-house thriller movies, so I decided not to even give it a go. Sounds like I made the right choice :D
 
I finished this last night. I didn't enjoy as much as Spiral and at times I wasn't following all of the technical aspects of the French political system but overall it was a satisfying watch.

Any more French TV recommendations would be very welcome.
I started a thread a while back about French language programming, hopefully it might get updated. I'm just about to start a French course with Alliance Française so I'm hoping to watch more French films and television to tune my ear into French frequency.

 
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Jurassic Valley. Not a recommendation. The opposite of a recommendation. Steer clear, it's a pile of shite. Acting is terribly wooden, dreadful. I've made it as far as the first 15 minutes. Normally, I'll watch any old shite as well as the good, and usually I'm a bit Mastermind when it comes to watching things: I've started so I'll finish. So I'll usually watch stuff until the bitter end. Not this though.
 
Finished season 2 of upload. Underwhelmed but it was passable.
Daughter is enjoying Paper Girls.
I didn't realise there was a third season of The Boys, so i'm getting started on that. It's ok. I think I have found each series about the same so far. I want to get more excited about it, but it's not amazing. I can see that it want's to be subversive, but the overall story is just not quite good enough.
That's not that it isn't decent, it just feels like it could be better. I also quite liked some of the cartoon shorts. Justin Roiland's was good, I'm disappointed to hear that he's being charged some horrible shit, he's already been dropped by Adult Swim. Why is everyone an arsehole? I hear it could mean up to seven years in prison.
Lower Decks seems to be something that both my daughter and I can manage together. It's actually probably the best Star Trek Series going.
 
The ending of The Rig was so annoying I nearly chinned my TV. And i should have seen it coming.
Agreed.


It was otherwise ok, it’s not a classic but it had a decent budget and some decent moments but it’s a low bar to be decent these days because so many bad shows exist.

Could have gone a bit eldritch and Lovecraftian or Poe but bogged down in explanations, ham acting from a couple of key characters and a desire to be both “we must be kind to evolve” and also set itself up for series two
 
Watched the first half of Strategem yesterday - it was OK - maybe a 6.5/10 - like Alan Partridge usually and the arc his career is taking as he ages

Watched the second half, maybe a 7 now.
 
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.

That Nick Cage film where he plays himself. I did enjoy it, but it could have been something so so so much more and still been a for the most part an actions comedy.
They introduced some really interesting ideas that could have been worked into a more cerebral second (even tragic or ambiguous) layer to the film. The double meta of them writing a movie as the movie plays out and Cage seeing his alt persona as a real person for instance. There were several instances where Cages personality could let his deluded ego wander and there could have been a mix of fantasy/madness and reality. I would have quite liked a bittersweet tragic end where even though the other guy died the film was completed. . . you think Cage is interacting with him but dicover it is like when Cage has a private conversation with his alter ego, and the alter ego and the other guy (the madolorian . . I forget his name) go off to the party (and you realise he died).

Or even at the end where the characters of his wife and daughter changed actresses. . . maybe if that wasn't the cliche 'now we are watching it as a movie in the future' but a deluded Cage has totally lost it. Something that could have been seeded throughout.
. . .anyway these are just little brain farts . . I just think there was a LOT of room for a lot more fun / interesting angles without it becoming Synecdoche New York.

The film ends up pretty much playing out as a straight up action comedy about a washed up egotistical actor who finds himself in a real life action comedy situation. With a few tweaks you could have swapped Cage out for Alan Partridge. . . or just 'actor' (a la Tropic Thunder)
 
Tenet.
I was expecting a confusing mind fuck from what I heard. . . But like that other one Nolan did about dream police, it was just a basic action/espionage flick, with a fun premise/gimmick.
The most confusing bit if anything was the actual spy/investigative stuff .
It was ok, but sadly not as mind bending as I had hoped.
 
Tenet.
I was expecting a confusing mind fuck from what I heard. . . But like that other one Nolan did about dream police, it was just a basic action/espionage flick, with a fun premise/gimmick.
The most confusing bit if anything was the actual spy/investigative stuff .
It was ok, but sadly not as mind bending as I had hoped.
Well, the thing is (I heard) the whole backwards/ forwards concept and set ups are meant to be theoretically accurate. And whereas I enjoyed it as a very well made and produced action thriller sci-fi film, my brain hurt whenever I tried to make sense of some scenes.

Which in turn made me feel like I was missing on an extra dimension in many subplots in the film. Like the final showdown battle with the differently colour coded soldiers. Or why the bullets were such a menace. Plenty of other things I got perfectly well though.
 
Well, the thing is (I heard) the whole backwards/ forwards concept and set ups are meant to be theoretically accurate. And whereas I enjoyed it as a very well made and produced action thriller sci-fi film, my brain hurt whenever I tried to make sense of some scenes.

Which in turn made me feel like I was missing on an extra dimension in many subplots in the film. Like the final showdown battle with the differently colour coded soldiers. Or why the bullets were such a menace. Plenty of other things I got perfectly well though.
I had no problem with the backwards stuff. On a basic level it made sense and it was fun to watch the same sequences again from another time direction. I thought that was easy enough to grasp. . certainly for the films purposes. . . . however, on a film making level so much of the plot wasn't actually explained very clearly as it went along (and I don't mean in dialogue or in terms of the flow of time, just the basic plot). When I got to the end, I was very unsatisfied with the villain's actual motivations and the final 'evil plan' that could have been something else that wasn't so stupid or convoluted.
The time travel wasn't complicated, but the bad story and the way it wasn't told properly made it seem more complicated than it was. I think inception probably suffers from the same problem. The basic concept is simple, but it wasn't always clear what the basic 'story' was.
 
Just seen that ALL the Mad Max films are currently on Prime, where I can’t recall them being available before 😎
Ha ha, I'm just watching the second one now as I type. I have seen thunderdome a squillion times and watched the first one once really late at night in the 80s. As I recall it's nothing at all like thunderdome . . . a real low budget flick where max was still a cop.
 
Liked the first two when much younger. Watching them years later and Tina Turner is probably the best thing about the thrid one. It veers into Peter Pan territory and is a different vibe from what went before. Althouhg, guess Mad Max 2 is very different from the original.

Fury Road is banging, even if Hardy was a shit during production. Maybe thats what it takes to play the role (sarcasm, not excusing prima donna/vile onset behaviour).
 
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