Urban75 Home About Offline BrixtonBuzz Contact

Netflix recommendations

I'm enjoying Bodkin, but they should have made them 30 minute episodes. 45 feels too long each time. I don't know why, but at the 30 minute mark in every episode I start to swtich off.
 
Finished Bodkin; christ it went on and on.....6 x 30 mins should have done it. 7 episodes, some if which were nearly an hour long, was too much. Needed a good trim.

There is a lot to enjoy about it, but it's uneven; it just had too many things going on by the end and it became less engaging as more directions were taken.

I thought Siobhán Cullen was great. A real presence. I've not seen anything she's done before.
 
Finished Bodkin; christ it went on and on.....6 x 30 mins should have done it. 7 episodes, some if which were nearly an hour long, was too much. Needed a good trim.

There is a lot to enjoy about it, but it's uneven; it just had too many things going on by the end and it became less engaging as more directions were taken.

I thought Siobhán Cullen was great. A real presence. I've not seen anything she's done before.
Hummm, I added it to my list yesterday, but this makes me want to remove it again.
 
Is it worth watching in your opinion?

Ah, that depends on what you enjoy watching... I love the scenery and it has a character who left Ireland years back and is afflicted with an intense cringe factor when she is forced to go back.

Again, only 1 ep in. Will come back for the yay/nay recommendation when we are done with it.
 
Bodkin walks a fine line between taking the piss out of the American for wanting to see quaint oirish ways, and depicting quaint oirish ways for the viewer. You have to just let it happen if you're going to enjoy it. Mostly good but I agree some episodes could be shorter.
 
Bodkin walks a fine line between taking the piss out of the American for wanting to see quaint oirish ways, and depicting quaint oirish ways for the viewer. You have to just let it happen if you're going to enjoy it. Mostly good but I agree some episodes could be shorter.
Am really liking Siobhan Cullen, who so far manages to rise above the material.
 
Murphy's Law

Ludicrous Jimmy Nesbit vehicle in which he plays an undercover cop who's the hard man's hard man. Not only does it resemble a 14 year old boy's idea of what real life is like, it's as if that was a 14 year old boy from the 1970s. We're reaching levels of Seventies Bloke Moustache-ness that we had previously thought impossible.

By Norn Iron-ish writer Colin Bateman. (I actually enjoyed it, but I'm not going to tell Mrs Idris, a staunch Prime Suspect fan, that).
 
Not a recommendation but a heads-up for fans of Squid Game-type subgenre. Brand new Korean series The 8 Show has just dropped


Premise is certainly my cup of tea. Reviews so far seem to gravitate between lukewarm and fairly watchable even if it’s not the next Squid Game. Will probably check it out but any early Urbanite reviews welcome.
 
I was really looking forward to Brian and Charles. Really disappointed to discover it was filmed as another fake documentary. I'm so tired of the format. It's also a massive waste as its quite sweet and chilled when it just gets on with it and the 'talking to the camera' bits stop.
The exposition coukd have come in the form of a home movie at the top, or a montage of him making stuff over the titles and a conversation with the woman in the shop. . Or just not at all. . . Just didn't need it.
 
Obituary. Siobhán Cullen shines again. She and Michael Smiley are very good, and it is worth watching for them. It's a comedy/drama which reminded me of Dexter at times. It's not as good as early Dexter, it's not even that funny, but it did keep me interested enough to watch it through. The ending wasn't all that satisfying; it was sufficient.

Wrong Kind of Black. A series of 4 autobiographical shorts based on the life of Boori Monty Pryor; it's funny, touching and thoughtful; not briliiantly written, or acted, but it feels personal and manages to deliver some heavy topics in a very light way. I was quite moved by it, I laughed throughout and I really wanted more episodes.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Chz
Unbelievable. Based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning article about a real life case. A young woman is raped and the police find it more convenient to make her say she made it up than to take her seriously. It’s bleak and frequently hard to watch but never less than captivating. Very skilfully written and acted — no scene is wasted, character development is artfully realised and dialogue always feels authentic. Well worth watching.

Also, in a very different genre One Punch Man. A(nother) subversion of the superhero genre, this time Japanese. A superhero has trained himself to the point that he can kill anything with one punch. And now he suffers from ennui, boredom and the fact that nobody recognises him because he never does anything memorable. Plus the greatest ever reveal of how he got his superpower. Should you watch it? No idea. It’s fun background fare though.
 
Last edited:
Unbelievable. Based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning article about a real life case. A young woman is raped and the police find it more convenient to make her say she made it up than to take her seriously. It’s bleak and frequently hard to watch but never less than captivating. Very skilfully written and acted — no scene is wasted, character development is artfully realised and dialogue always feels authentic. Well worth watching.

Merritt Wever was incredible in that show. Also amazing in Godless.
 
Not a recommendation but a heads-up for fans of Squid Game-type subgenre. Brand new Korean series The 8 Show has just dropped


Premise is certainly my cup of tea. Reviews so far seem to gravitate between lukewarm and fairly watchable even if it’s not the next Squid Game. Will probably check it out but any early Urbanite reviews welcome.
I finished it. I wanted to stop watching it at some points, because of the violence & torture porn aspect of it, but, something kept me watching it. I watched the dubbed version and thought that was done well (watching some dubbed shows, like Physical 100, doesn't work so well, bc there are too many people talking). So, yeah, there were some things I appreciated and other stuff I found abhorrent (maybe that was the point) and even a nod to A Clockwork Orange and some twists along the way.

Could have been shorter though, but I guess 8 episodes makes sense. Maybe shorter episodes. Also I think some plot holes and things I could nitpick, but well, it's ok for what it is. Visually speaking, I think it's superior to Squid Game, there are some very striking/interesting scenes. And a couple of genuinely funny moments amidst the horror.
 
Well ! I've just finished Ripley and have to say I bladdy loved it ! Loved the cinematography, loved Andrew Scott in it, good to see Malkovich in at the end, even found some scenes genuinely tense. I think filming the faded elegance of Italy in black and white was a brilliant, fitting idea that just made the whole romanticism of it more intense. Just a super piece of television.
 
The Asunta Case is very interesting. It's a Spanish 6 parter about an apparently famous murder of a girl in Galicia.

It gives a fascinating insight into the bizarre (if true) way that criminal investigations are conducted in Spain, basically in public, with the lawyers and police reporting the whole investigation to the press as it develops.
I quite enjoyed this one. It made our paparazzi look like saints in comparison though and there was little sense of closure at the end, but that's how it was irl I guess.

We've just finished the first episode of A Nearly Normal Family, dark stuff but would recommend so far.
 
The Many Saints of Newark

Watched this over two nights. Mrs. I has never seen the Sopranos, and I've never seen it all the way through. This worked as a stand alone movie though - or worked up to a point.

The whole trope of the Italian-American gangster became a cliched caricature a long time ago. I frankly wouldn't have cared if any of these people died in a fire, and frankly the whole "dodgy guy tries to do a right thing, and is undone by his attempt" was done far, far better fifty years ago in Mean Streets than in anything since.

Like the Irishman and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the nostalgia for a time when the American Dream wasn't just a bad joke was palpable. What does that say about America today?
 
The Many Saints of Newark

Watched this over two nights. Mrs. I has never seen the Sopranos, and I've never seen it all the way through. This worked as a stand alone movie though - or worked up to a point.

The whole trope of the Italian-American gangster became a cliched caricature a long time ago. I frankly wouldn't have cared if any of these people died in a fire, and frankly the whole "dodgy guy tries to do a right thing, and is undone by his attempt" was done far, far better fifty years ago in Mean Streets than in anything since.

Like the Irishman and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the nostalgia for a time when the American Dream wasn't just a bad joke was palpable. What does that say about America today?
Would have worked better as a miniseries, but it's an interesting prequel to the actual series, especially if you followed it all the way through.

Sopranos did it better, though. Deconstructing the mafia epics and yet becoming one itself.
 
We started The 8 Show last night. Another Korean game show style thing, possibly in the same vain as Squid Game (but i never saw that so cant really compare)
 
We started The 8 Show last night. Another Korean game show style thing, possibly in the same vain as Squid Game (but i never saw that so cant really compare)
If you think it’s fairly mild comparatively speaking, shit gets increasingly real once you hit the middle episodes.
 
Dramas about missing kids are not my first port of call, but starting the brand new miniseries Eric because it sounds unusual and anything but orthodox. About 3/5 aggregate ratings so far but sounds interesting enough. Also, Cumberbatch’s performance is said to be brilliant.

 
Back
Top Bottom