Netflix Recommendations Thread 3.0

Caquas · 07-01-2022 10:46pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118425227#Comment_118425227

Far too many such films to give even one example? A film which the critics love but masses of people watched and found, not offensive, but simply boring?

Don't under-rate the Oscars. Film-makers don't. They are the ultimate accolade in the film industry. If you win an Oscar, you were made in Hollywood. Everytime an Oscar-winner is introduced on TV, it is mentioned first. Sidney Poitier RIP. You may be too young to remember the national hysteria here over the Oscars for "My Left Foot" and "In the Name of the Father". Golden Globes? Barely an appetiser for the main course.

But the past few years have been dismal for the Oscars. In the past, the Best Picture Oscar went to popular films - the Godfather, Lawrence of Arabia, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. Now it's niche movies - Green Book, Moonlight. I think the third Lord of the Rings movie was the last big boxoffice movie to win Best Picture. So the audience for the Oscars has dwindled. Does anyone do Oscar parties anymore? (Admittedly, Parasite was an excellent movie).

The problem for Lost Daughter is that it streamed on Netflix. I don't mean the old Luddite problem - remember when the Hollywood elite looked down their noses at Netflix! 😁 No, the problem now is that the vast bulk of Netflix's subscriber base watched Lost Daughter and found it to be dull, pointless, confusing, cranky, dispiriting, charmless, draining ... I'll stop there because I'll be accused of something. I see some favourable comments here and the gushing reviews online. None have enlightened me about the plot or the characters' motivations.

Here's a typical explainer which promises to "explain the ending" but just gives us a blow-by-blow of the action and speculates about whether Leda dies or not.

My point is, by the end of this film, I barely know if I'm dead or alive!

https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/a38591079/the-lost-daughter-ending-explained-netflix/

brookers · 07-01-2022 10:59pm

I really liked The Nest with Jude Law, he has changed so much, something funny about his mouth. I guess we are all getting older!! I have met some bull shitters in my life like him....

Caquas · 08-01-2022 12:06pm

We’re enjoying “Your home made perfect”, a BBC home design series series with fancy VR imaging.

It’s great to stream because you can skip to the best bits (the high-tech reveal).

I am sick to see what can be done in Britain on a 50K budget. OK, that’s €60K here but I reckon costs here are at least 30% higher. I understand that quotes on this show don’t include the architectural fees.

Angela Scanlon has made a great career in Britain and I can see why - she is lively and glamorous but also very relatable.. One of the very few to graduate from RTE.

holly_johnson · 08-01-2022 12:45pm

I’ve been watching this too and enjoying it. I’m literally only finishing a complete home renovation myself and I am shocked by how much they get for their money! My job cost way more than anything paid so far!

RocketRaccoon · 08-01-2022 12:55pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118436397#Comment_118436397

People, not you BTW, are putting far too much thought and effort into trying to push that it was a good movie. It wasn't, it was boring rubbish. I'm all for pretentious, arthouse movies that have a story to tell, I love movies, have done since childhood 30+ years ago. I love top class acting performances, I love being blown away by an actor at the very top of their game. I love being led down plenty of different avenues in a movie that lead to a good conclusion.

The lost daughter provided none of the above, to keep it quite simple, it was shite. No long posts with 15 paragraphs required for this one.

johnny_ultimate · 08-01-2022 1:19pm

Or, to put it simply: different people have different responses to a motion picture :)

Caquas · 08-01-2022 3:58pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118424466#Comment_118424466

No, the problem is not the “vitriol” from user reviews for a “solid, well-made” movie. The problem is the disconnect between the audience and the leading critics who have, without notable exception, lavished praise on this cluncker.

Here are the uniformly positive reviews from all the “Top Critics”. Not a word of criticism, except some oblique hints that this film is confusing and beyond the average punter,

I’m reminded of Elaine’s hatred for the English Patient in Seinfeld. What can you do when your ears are filled with praise for the artistry of the material but you see the Emperor parading around butt naked?

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_lost_daughter/reviews?type=top_critics

TICKLE_ME_ELMO · 08-01-2022 4:04pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118439268#Comment_118439268

The problem there seems to be with people paying too much attention to critics in the first place. Make up your own mind about whether you want to see something. Then make up your own mind about whether you liked it or not. It's not that difficult. People acting like critics are deliberately lying to them, or it's some big scam at the expense of the casual movie goer is silly. It's just not that deep.

Sites like Rotten Tomatoes are a pain in the ****. The amount of posts I see, not just here, talking about the audience score vs the critic score, and then people seem to have some sort of nervous breakdown if they can't make their opinion match one or the other.

dublin49 · 08-01-2022 4:37pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118439268#Comment_118439268

just on critics when I use rotten tomatoes I take much more notice of the viewer % then the critics view,critics factor in worthiness which alot of the time has no connection to enjoyment,THE LIGHTHOUSE is a typical example of the film type critics love and most ordinary punters looking to be entertained dont enjoy.Maybe I am a philistine but IMO some really garbage movies get credit because critics think they might be outed as imposters if they said they were bored out of their tree watching 3 hours of misery.Its like these up there own arse restaurants that give you a ludicrous dish and you feel obliged to proclaim the chef a genius.

johnny_ultimate · 08-01-2022 5:02pm

Two final points before bowing out of this one:

I think there's a tendency in online film discussion to insist everyone else is wrong, and sadly aggregator critic / audience scores - a deeply flawed metric for a plethora of reasons, not least that they're prone to manipulation - have been weaponised in this sense. Personally I feel it's a dead-end discussion wise. We all come at individual films from different perspectives, at different times, with different interests, in different moods even! Hell, I know a film that might not hit for me today might if I watched it after work on Monday night :) Disagreements are a healthy and reasonable response to any art, and TBH all we can do is give our own honest responses to a film and not assume anyone who disagrees is doing so from a bad or insincere place. Passion is great in film discussions (I for one wouldn't be on this forum if I didn't enjoy teasing out what worked / didn't work for different viewers), but there can be no objectively 'correct' response to any film thanks to good old human nature.
There are bad critics out there for sure - elitist ones in some cases, in others people who're willing to give the latest bland superhero film a gushing review in return for a free ticket for the premiere 😅 But equally there are film critics out there who are widly passionate about film - about its history and its form, but also about the sheer rush of seeing a film that surprises or moves you on a big or small screen (whether that's a bleak Romanian drama or a big, silly blockbuster). While aggregator scores can give you a guide to say 'well, maybe this is / isn't worth watching' (since none of us have the time for everything that's out there!) it shouldn't be taken for gospel. Instead IMO it's best to find a few critics' whose opinion you respect and trust - not so you can agree uniformly with whatever they say, but instead someone who can give you a better understanding or perspective on any given film. Sometimes the best and most insightful review of a film is one that you don't actually agree with, but you know comes from a genuine and honest place.

flasher0030 · 08-01-2022 5:26pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118439293#Comment_118439293

In order to make up your mind if you liked something or not, you need to invest approx. 2 hours of your life to watching it. I'm not going to just waste 2 hours of my life watching something that I haven't at least done some research into e.g. very brief outline of the plot, without giving anything away to see if it's a comedy, horror, sci-fi etc. And I have a look at the reviews on rotten tomatoes, metacritic, and amazon to get an idea if it received mainly positive or mainly negative. If a movie gets the likes of 30% on RT, and same around metacritic and, say 3.5 on amazon, I won't go near it. If a movie gets bad reviews across the board, there is a very good chance that I will not enjoy it. I don't mind adopting the herd mentality on this one. If I am to invest 2 hrs of my time into a film, I will do my best to make sure that I really enjoy it. And it has really worked for me so far.

TICKLE_ME_ELMO · 08-01-2022 5:36pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118439650#Comment_118439650

That's great if doing it that way yields successful results for you. That's not really what I was talking about though. I'm talking about the people who act like the reviews on a site like RT are gospel and appear to be outraged when they dislike something that has a high critic score. There's plenty of really great films get extremely low scores from audience reviews and they have nothing to do with the film being good or not. People deliberately tank those cumulative scores all the time.

But anyway, this is all very off topic and Johnny probably summed it up best in the post above yours, so I'll say no more.

dublin49 · 08-01-2022 5:49pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118439533#Comment_118439533

we are going down a rabbit hole if we are going to start critiquing the critics,as you say some of them are passionate about film but at times that's the problem,connoisseurs of anything will always be more engrossed and engaged than the great unwashed and their tolerance for boring interludes is far greater than the ordinary viewer.In general I find if a film gains word of mouth appeal or acclaim from the general film going public its normally worth a look.

pixelburp · 08-01-2022 6:07pm

Making absolute pronouncements on Film Critics like they're some kind of sniffy, monolithic group is as daft as blanket statements about the "average punter", given both generalisations are prone to stereotypes and reduction. Film critics are snobs; the public are idiots etc. etc. And aggregators are a pox on film discussion as all they show are kneejerk reactions from those already Emotionally invested enough to leave a score in the first place. Most "reviews" would have Twitter snort for their brevity. It reduces an artform to a zero sum game and that can F off.

There are plenty of critics out there to suit all tastes, especially online with its global scope; it's not hard to find those that broadly align with one's own tastes - and even if they occasionally recommend something so heretical that it's a bit "art house", ... so what? Sometimes I'll stumble across a pearl I'd have otherwise ignored and that's an awesome feeling. Burger is just as nice as steak, a varied palette is in general, a good thing. But I don't need critics to 100% align with my tastes to respect or be interested in their viewpoints.

Christ I barely have any overlapping tastes with Johnny Ultimate half the time yet every now and again he'll mention some random indie, I'll check it out and cool. A little gem. The rest of the time he's occupying a different plane to mine; there's room for us both, even if we applied the same absolutism he's one of these "arty" types us proles wouldn't have any truck with.

dublin49 · 08-01-2022 6:22pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118439845#Comment_118439845

you decry absolute pronouncements and then proceed to make some of your own.

pixelburp · 08-01-2022 6:26pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118439918#Comment_118439918

Where? Not trying to claim my opinion holds any greater water, but the "critics are rubbish cos they liked X movie" is a well worn argument.

dublin49 · 08-01-2022 6:50pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118439946#Comment_118439946

"And aggregators are a pox on film discussion as all they show are kneejerk reactions from those already Emotionally invested enough to leave a score in the first place. Most "reviews" would have Twitter snort for their brevity. ¬

is that not an absolutist view on film aggregators?

The Raging Bile Duct · 08-01-2022 6:56pm

There's a bit 'we've had enough of experts' vibe that comes off the anger that gets directed at critics which is part and parcel of daily life these days. I haven't watched Lost Daughter but I've watched plenty of arthouse movies and critical darlings in my time. Some have landed for me and some I've bounced off but I've never got angry about it or somehow felt that people were trying to trick me by saying they liked it. That's just plain weird imo.

pixelburp · 08-01-2022 7:03pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118440096#Comment_118440096

Like I said, I'm not trying to pull a holier than thou; but aggregators by design try to reduce the messy grey area of "opinions on art-entertainment" to a percentage value, which already makes them absolutist. While even their maths has been a bit suspect. Any time they come up, it's invariably as a bullet to "prove" X film is hated by the general populous, or critics out of touch. It all reduces the value of opinion, and the medium to "content".

dublin49 · 08-01-2022 7:04pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118440142#Comment_118440142

absolutely .the critics do what they do but and I am going to accused of absolutism here but its my view in general they mark the Arty movies much higher than the general public and rather than us look for the critic that suits us should they not bear in mind whose reading their reviews.

bodhrandude · 08-01-2022 7:05pm

Well managed to catch Prison Break in its entirety before it disappeared at the end of last month, my nephew was watching it in Cork and got his dad hooked, I started watching it with them at the Season 1 finale, so followed it right though to Season 5. My rating, Season 1 (Brilliant) Season 2 (Decent enough) Season 3 (Maybe questionable at times) Season 4 picked up a bit again. Season 5 (Completely irrelevant, never needed to be reprised.) Then I watched all of Season 1 and the season 2 opening episode. So a bit back to front. Anyone seen Ted Lasso yet or is that for the Apple channel discussion.

john9876 · 08-01-2022 7:21pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118438456#Comment_118438456

hmmm, I live in London and I'm very sceptical about the prices quoted in this program.

They seem to restructure and extend a whole ground floor for £100k.

A very modest kitchen extension I've had quotes for were about 75-80k pre pandemic and pre Brexit. Now it will be well north of 100k.

RocketRaccoon · 08-01-2022 7:49pm

Just to go back to the critic thing quickly.

I've never once had a critic influence my decision to watch a movie, I'll always watch a trailer of something I see recommended and if it looks like I'll enjoy it then I'll go ahead and watch it and form my own opinion. This goes for music and games too.

There are too many critics out there trying to be pretentious and better than everyone with their movie taste and I saw past that a long long time ago.

TICKLE_ME_ELMO · 08-01-2022 8:09pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118440292#Comment_118440292

Pretty sure these eps are a few years old at this point. 2019 I think on S2, so possibly work done in 2018, if that makes any difference.

fritzelly · 08-01-2022 8:15pm

Just to go back to the critic thing quickly.

Please don't

TICKLE_ME_ELMO · 08-01-2022 8:32pm

A small child hijacked my account over Christmas and one of the things she was watching was City of Ghosts. It's a really sweet little show about a group of kids who investigate ghosts in various neighbourhoods of Los Angeles. Each episode features a different location and basically serve as little mini history lessons on some of the older parts of the city. It's for kids, I guess, but I've found it quite interesting and it's got really mellow vibes, great for just relaxing for 20 minutes. There's some really fantastic animation in it too, especially the backgrounds.

gmisk · 08-01-2022 10:54pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118440199#Comment_118440199

Ted Lasso is terrific.

It takes a turn to the more serious in season 2 but not in a bad way.

Charlie19 · 08-01-2022 11:23pm

I agree... Ted Lasso is excellent and so many likable characters along with being very funny.

jluv · 08-01-2022 11:31pm

Just finished State of Play (2009) but I'd not seen it before. Really enjoyed it..

09-01-2022 1:28am

Just finished Mother / Android. I thought it looked interesting from what popped up on the banner. I wanted to like it but found all of it to be disappointingly bad, boring and too long.

I watched the Silent Sea recently, enjoyed the series for the most part, thought the pacing was perfect. While I know that it is Sci Fi, and that some suspension of disbelief is required, the ending took too big a leap for me.

I'm now on season 5 of Superstore, really enjoying this, but think it's starting to run out steam a bit? I'm hoping the episodes I watched were just blips and that it picks up again soon.

Netflix Recommendations Thread 3.0

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