repulsionist
TI Forumite
actively disinterested
Posts: 3,678 
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Post by repulsionist on Aug 22, 2023 21:53:37 GMT -5
I'm aggrieved that it took personal research to discover Baroness von Sketch, rather than find out about it here. And Steven Wright, Boston comedian, put out a novel back in May?
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Post by Ben Grimm on Aug 23, 2023 7:23:33 GMT -5
I'm aggrieved that it took personal research to discover Baroness von Sketch, rather than find out about it here. And Steven Wright, Boston comedian, put out a novel back in May? If only there was some sort of pop culture website that could keep us informed about that sort of thing, maybe with a lively comments section. And that didn't degenerate into terrible clickbait after a series of corporate takeovers. |
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Post by Desert Dweller on Aug 24, 2023 22:38:39 GMT -5
Feel free to sing in front of me! I'm mostly fine with just regular people singing. As long as they aren't claiming to be a professional trained singer!
I mean, I was joking, but I would describe myself as "church good" - I can carry a tune and harmonize, I can read music (played the flute and piano) but I have no formal training and not a big range. I did watch the OMITB episode, and I will say that I wasn't that focused on her actual voice, so no, I didn't notice the autotune. But I also wasn't listening for it. I can understand why it would bother you. Yeah, but I teach beginning and intermediate singers sometimes. So, it doesn't bother me to hear untrained singers. What bothers me is hearing untrained singers who have been autotuned and pitch corrected so that the computer makes them sounds like real singers.
There was so much vocal processing on Streep's voice that that it really grated on my ears. And to be fair, they also autotuned Ashley Park's voice in that scene, so the post-production people clearly didn't care who could sing or couldn't. They just wanted a robotic "perfect" tune.
Autotune everywhere always bothers me. I can hear it everywhere in music. It is one of the reasons I have largely tuned out contemporary pop and R&B. The ear training I have is good enough that I can hear autotune and especially pitch correction. It all sounds deeply unnatural to me. It makes singers sound like robots.
So when Streep started singing, all I could hear was the overwhelming amount of computerized vocal processing.
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Post by Desert Dweller on Aug 24, 2023 22:42:44 GMT -5
I don't like Streep's singing either, though I'm not so bothered that it ruined the scene for me. I quite liked it and felt it was yet another example of the show being more daring and interesting than I'd maybe expect from a Steve Martin and Martin Short production in 2023. OMITB is really a neat show. But your comment highlights one of the bigger problems I have with Death Rattle Dazzle: you can't just turn a play into a musical and keep the same cast ... on Broadway. Not that it has to be realistic, but none of these performers was hired to sing in the show.
I really like OMITB, and as I said, I really love the actual storyline they have going for Martin Short's character this season.
But, yeah, your last point is something that has been slightly irritating to me. Honestly, I expected there to be a twist and a joke in the Meryl Streep scene, to be that her character couldn't sing! Seriously, if you were casting a musical from the beginning you wouldn't keep the same cast you had for a dramatic play. In episode 3 I kept waiting for one of the play actors to say, "Um, wait, I can't sing!"
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Post by Prole Hole on Aug 25, 2023 12:48:13 GMT -5
I mean, I was joking, but I would describe myself as "church good" - I can carry a tune and harmonize, I can read music (played the flute and piano) but I have no formal training and not a big range. I did watch the OMITB episode, and I will say that I wasn't that focused on her actual voice, so no, I didn't notice the autotune. But I also wasn't listening for it. I can understand why it would bother you. It all sounds deeply unnatural to me. It makes singers sound like robots.
... and your point? |
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Post by Desert Dweller on Aug 27, 2023 14:12:22 GMT -5
It all sounds deeply unnatural to me. It makes singers sound like robots.
... and your point?
Proly, my point is that humans should sound like humans, and robots should sound like robots. I need the sound to match the image. It irritates me when it is all mixed up!
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repulsionist
TI Forumite
actively disinterested
Posts: 3,678
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Post by repulsionist on Aug 27, 2023 15:24:43 GMT -5
Been watching the FIBA World Cup 2023. It's extremely interesting to see different countries' style of play. There are some huge people on the planet. So far Latvia is the unexpected challenger of the competition this cup.
Enjoyed what I could of the Brewers v. Padres yesterday. Also got to see the Meadows kid get his first HR in the Friday Tigers v. Astros game. It's quite nice to live abroad and coincidentally catch a game in inning 6 or higher, knowing I don't have to be invested for the full game time and get to see exciting baseball.
Taskmaster (S10:E5) - Daisy's melon eating! What a lascivious lark.
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Post by Jean-Luc Lemur on Aug 27, 2023 19:03:57 GMT -5
I do revisit MXC episodes now and again but while they still make me laugh thereās the odd joke that really hasnāt aged well. Iām also definitely curious about the originalmoverall too. Iāve found the original on Internet Archive (donāt trust my phone to do straight quotes and donāt want to go into desktop mode so Iāll boomer link it archive.org/details/003-1986-05-16) but no clue whether theyāre subbed. The Internet Archive stuff isā¦tricky. Ones labeled subs arenāt necessarily subbed and there are only a handful of full episodes with English subtitles (all taken from the special features of the MXC DVDs, incidentally): 1, 61, 67, 75. 86, and 93 (one of those is the winter special, which provided the source material my favorite MXC episode). Theyāre out there in the river of questionable media sourcing. |
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Rainbow Rosa
TI Forumite
not gay, just colorful
Posts: 3,604 
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Post by Rainbow Rosa on Aug 29, 2023 11:23:20 GMT -5
I don't think I'm vibing quite as much with this season of The Other Two, which in making the title characters more antiheroic loses something of the core that made the show more than just a funny-but-not-that-deep series of pop culture gags (and I'm saying this as someone firmly on team no-hugging-no-learning, but that core family unit really was key to the show) - but I'm willing to forgive that for the sheer belly laugh I got from 8 Gay Men with AIDS: A Poem of Many Hours, the best Broadway-show-within-a-show since Stop the Planet of the Apes, I Want to Get Off!
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Post by Pedantic Editor Type on Aug 29, 2023 11:30:16 GMT -5
We're on S4 of our Angel rewatch (just finished E14, Release) and I feel like Faith brings some much needed energy back to the show. Feels like things are happening and there's a chance for not everything to be terrible.
But it's still kinda hard to watch it and not think about how much Joss is punishing Charisma Carpenter. I do not like Cordy's arc at all.
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Post by Desert Dweller on Aug 29, 2023 11:48:59 GMT -5
I got an iPhone upgrade, so I am now getting 3 months of AppleTV+ for free.
Finally watching S3 of Ted Lasso. I have watched the first 3 episodes now. It's okay so far. Jamie is the standout character so far.
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Rainbow Rosa
TI Forumite
not gay, just colorful
Posts: 3,604
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Post by Rainbow Rosa on Aug 31, 2023 7:01:18 GMT -5
Not a bad piece, necessarily, but oh boy was I laughing at that opening paragraph, and not in a good way:
Ah, yes, my favorite kind of passion project - the reheated '90s IP.
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Post by Roy Batty's Pet Dove on Aug 31, 2023 7:34:40 GMT -5
Proly, my point is that humans should sound like humans, and robots should sound like robots. I need the sound to match the image. It irritates me when it is all mixed up!
I believe that Prole Hole is probably making a joke in character of his Crow the Talking Robot persona. Crow is a talking robot from the popular television program Mystery Science Theater 3000, an unrealistic series about a sequence of human men from the Earth who find themselves trapped on spacecraft where they are forced to watch bad movies by villainous max scientists or other generic science fiction villain tropes. In order to make their ordeal bearable, the men trapped on the ship create or befriend several sentient robots. One of them is named after a slur for Romany people, and her gimmick is I guess having a vaguely problematic premise as a character and rarely getting any funny lines. Then thereās Cambot, the heart and soul of the program. Most people ignore Cambot, but without him their beloved MST3K literally wouldnāt even exist, because the metafictional conceit of the show is that Cambot is filming the entire program, although in reality, they just had regular humans filming the show on a cheap TV set on Earth. The other two sentient robots spend most of the duration of the episodes making fun of (or āriffingā) the bad movies that the human host is forced to watch along with said human. Thereās Tom Servo; his gimmick is that heās also gum ball machine and that heās probably the most misogynistic character. And finally thereās Crow the Talking Robot. His gimmick is that he looks like Prole Holeās avatar and also that he enjoys making transphobic and racist jokes and also jokes about the last names of Japanese people, but also making jokes about other topics, and many of the jokes in this last category are actually funny. One last thing: you likely have a lot of questions about the logistics of how the human characters survive in space and how the robots and other technology works scientifically speaking, to which my response would be that these are good questions to ask and I think itās good for people to spend time thinking about them, and while I always skipped the first 90 seconds or so of each episode of MST3K that I watched, Iām sure the people involved in making the show would agree that this is a healthy subject to fixate on. Anyway, that was probably why Prole Hole responded to you as he did, rather than actually wanting to know why singers that are auto tuned to hell sound worse than human singers. |
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Post by Pedantic Editor Type on Aug 31, 2023 7:39:43 GMT -5
Not a bad piece, necessarily, but oh boy was I laughing at that opening paragraph, and not in a good way:
Ah, yes, my favorite kind of passion project - the reheated '90s IP.
I mean, yes, it was obviously based on a 30-year-old movie. But it was an excellent show, and I do believe it was a passion project in the sense that the creators were passionate about the subject matter. I'm sad it got canceled. |
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Post by Desert Dweller on Aug 31, 2023 10:38:51 GMT -5
Anyway, that was probably why Prole Hole responded to you as he did, rather than actually wanting to know why singers that are auto tuned to hell sound worse than human singers. Um, I knew all that. |
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Post by Desert Dweller on Sept 2, 2023 19:43:59 GMT -5
I just watched episode 5 of season 3 of "Only Murders in the Building".
I know this isn't shocking, but wow, Meryl Streep is fantastic in this episode. It is amazing that she can create such a layered character with so little screentime.
When she was announced for the season 3 cast, I assumed she would just be doing a cameo. But no. Wow, she has a major role in this season. And seriously, WOW, she was great in episode 5.
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Post by Pedantic Editor Type on Sept 3, 2023 13:27:39 GMT -5
TWBE has been watching I Think You Should Leave and it just confirms what I suspected: not my kind of show.
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ABz Bš¹anaz
Grandfathered In 
This country is (now less of) a shitshow.
Posts: 1,978
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Post by ABz Bš¹anaz on Sept 3, 2023 14:01:26 GMT -5
I just watched the first episode of the live-action One Piece show on Netflix, and it looks GREAT. Really funny and absurd. I never watched the anime, was only tangentially aware of it.
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Post by DangOlJimmyITellYouWhat on Sept 3, 2023 15:07:36 GMT -5
I need the internet to understand that when someone on Reservation Dogs says āskodenā (letās go then), itās not a Native American thing. Itās an Oklahoma thing. 100%. Iāve said, my friends have said it, Iāve heard strangers say it. It didnāt even register to me something to puzzle out.
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Post by Floyd Diabolical Barber on Sept 3, 2023 22:27:30 GMT -5
I need the internet to understand that when someone on Reservation Dogs says āskodenā (letās go then), itās not a Native American thing. Itās an Oklahoma thing. 100%. Iāve said, my friends have said it, Iāve heard strangers say it. It didnāt even register to me something to puzzle out. I love learning about some of the regionalism's in the American vocabulary. My parents lived in Texas before they moved to Illinois and had me, and as a kid I was often told that my room "looked like Cooter Brown" lived there. I always thought that was just some slob they knew from those days until I heard the same name invoked in the same context in the movie "Urban Cowboy" and learned that that was a common expression in Texas. |
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Post by Mrs David Tennant on Sept 4, 2023 7:46:53 GMT -5
I need the internet to understand that when someone on Reservation Dogs says āskodenā (letās go then), itās not a Native American thing. Itās an Oklahoma thing. 100%. Iāve said, my friends have said it, Iāve heard strangers say it. It didnāt even register to me something to puzzle out. I love learning about some of the regionalism's in the American vocabulary. My parents lived in Texas before they moved to Illinois and had me, and as a kid I was often told that my room "looked like Cooter Brown" lived there. I always thought that was just some slob they knew from those days until I heard the same name invoked in the same context in the movie "Urban Cowboy" and learned that that was a common expression in Texas. The only regionalism I got from Texas is "I'm fixin' to do" something. And even that I don't use as much as I once did, given that I've been gone from Texas for 15 years (which, ack! Where did the time go?!). |
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Post by Pedantic Editor Type on Sept 4, 2023 8:26:43 GMT -5
I need the internet to understand that when someone on Reservation Dogs says āskodenā (letās go then), itās not a Native American thing. Itās an Oklahoma thing. 100%. Iāve said, my friends have said it, Iāve heard strangers say it. It didnāt even register to me something to puzzle out. I donāt think I ever registered it as anything but a mumbly version of āletās go thenā. |
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Rainbow Rosa
TI Forumite
not gay, just colorful
Posts: 3,604
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Post by Rainbow Rosa on Sept 4, 2023 14:26:42 GMT -5
Not a bad piece, necessarily, but oh boy was I laughing at that opening paragraph, and not in a good way:
Ah, yes, my favorite kind of passion project - the reheated '90s IP.
I mean, yes, it was obviously based on a 30-year-old movie. But it was an excellent show, and I do believe it was a passion project in the sense that the creators were passionate about the subject matter. I'm sad it got canceled. Ehhhhhhh? Look, there's no shortage of shows adapted from beloved-ish films. Some of them are even good enough that they completely overshadow the source material. (Do people born after 1970 even realize M*A*S*H was a film? I didn't.) But to be clear: seemingly half of the shows greenlit in the past two years meet the description of "adaptation/prequel/sequel/legacyquel of beloved-ish film but we've made it multiracial and X times gayer." That you can substitute Grease, Fatal Attraction, or Child's Play into this formula isn't evidence of a conspiracy or anything like that, it's just the obvious collision of two trends in Hollywood: a successful push for diversity in casting and in writers' rooms (good!), and all of any given studio's resources being devoted to shoring up and modernizing its trove of IP at the expense of new ideas (absofuckinglutely terrible!)
I bet A League of Their Own: The TV Show! is, in fact, very good, and everyone involved really wanted the show to succeed. I bet Greta Gerwig was really passionate about making Barbie, too! And yet, even granted that Barbie was a fun movie, it would be pretty weird if we described a film greenlit for the most craven of capitalist imperatives as a "passion project." I think the term should be reserved pretty much exclusively for media that does not have an obvious relationship with financial incentives, personally!
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Post by Desert Dweller on Sept 4, 2023 15:45:56 GMT -5
There's video circulating recently of Aaron Paul on the SAG picket line, and he says he gets "nothing from Netflix for Breaking Bad".
That should sum up why SAG is striking. Happy Labor Day!
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Dellarigg
AV Clubber
This is a public service announcement - with guitars
Posts: 7,631
Member is Online
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Post by Dellarigg on Sept 4, 2023 16:01:56 GMT -5
Rewatching I, Claudius after a couple of decades. There are moments in this that must count as the most brutal ever put on screen. Certainly on British TV. I didnāt watch all of GoT, but I canāt imagine it topped this. And I donāt mean seeing Patrick Stewart with hair.
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Post by sarapen on Sept 4, 2023 18:32:53 GMT -5
So I'm still liking The Wheel of Time in season 2. My main takeaway is the same from season 1 - they should have more episodes. It felt kind of zoomy cutting from one place to another in episode 1.
A longer season would have given more runtime to let each setting breathe a bit more. But the characters are established now and so is the setting, so at least we're not constantly getting blindsided by new crap constantly. Also I feel like the writing has improved. I think the show also really upped its game on the production values, especially the costumes. The new actor for Mat feels fine, I completely bought him as the character after a minute or so.
I also finally started watching The OA this long weekend. You know, I've generally been positive on Britt Marling's movies but maybe she needs the restraint imposed by a shorter runtime and smaller budget. In particular, the fantasy bits in the show are a tad overdone. I mean, on paper an Arab angel in interdimensional CGI space sounds trippy but in practice it's kind of hokey. Also the makeup in season 1 really makes me notice how big Britt Marling's nose is. I'm seeing its size in every scene.
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Post by Prole Hole on Sept 5, 2023 7:43:04 GMT -5
Rewatching I, Claudius after a couple of decades. There are moments in this that must count as the most brutal ever put on screen. Certainly on British TV. I didnāt watch all of GoT, but I canāt imagine it topped this. And I donāt mean seeing Patrick Stewart with hair. It's almost unbelievable how good I, Claudius is. It's straightforwardly one of the best pieces of TV drama ever produced anywhere. Without simply gushing, it's hard to explain just how good it is without simply sitting down and watching the damned thing. |
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LazBro
Prolific Poster 
Posts: 10,267
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Post by LazBro on Sept 5, 2023 8:16:57 GMT -5
Really enjoyed the first episode of the Netflix live-action adaptation of One Piece. I've not seen the anime and like hell am I ever starting a show with over one thousand episodes, so this'll have to do. Very colorful, fast paced, upbeat attitude. Funny, even silly, and I enjoyed it. Just nice to watch something that feels different.
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Post by Pedantic Editor Type on Sept 5, 2023 8:22:03 GMT -5
I mean, yes, it was obviously based on a 30-year-old movie. But it was an excellent show, and I do believe it was a passion project in the sense that the creators were passionate about the subject matter. I'm sad it got canceled. Ehhhhhhh? Look, there's no shortage of shows adapted from beloved-ish films. Some of them are even good enough that they completely overshadow the source material. (Do people born after 1970 even realize M*A*S*H was a film? I didn't.) But to be clear: seemingly half of the shows greenlit in the past two years meet the description of "adaptation/prequel/sequel/legacyquel of beloved-ish film but we've made it multiracial and X times gayer." That you can substitute Grease, Fatal Attraction, or Child's Play into this formula isn't evidence of a conspiracy or anything like that, it's just the obvious collision of two trends in Hollywood: a successful push for diversity in casting and in writers' rooms (good!), and all of any given studio's resources being devoted to shoring up and modernizing its trove of IP at the expense of new ideas (absofuckinglutely terrible!)
I bet A League of Their Own: The TV Show! is, in fact, very good, and everyone involved really wanted the show to succeed. I bet Greta Gerwig was really passionate about making Barbie, too! And yet, even granted that Barbie was a fun movie, it would be pretty weird if we described a film greenlit for the most craven of capitalist imperatives as a "passion project." I think the term should be reserved pretty much exclusively for media that does not have an obvious relationship with financial incentives, personally!
I mean, fair, we're clearly using "passion project" somewhat differently but I see what you're saying. |
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Dellarigg
AV Clubber
This is a public service announcement - with guitars
Posts: 7,631
Member is Online
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Post by Dellarigg on Sept 5, 2023 8:23:10 GMT -5
Rewatching I, Claudius after a couple of decades. There are moments in this that must count as the most brutal ever put on screen. Certainly on British TV. I didnāt watch all of GoT, but I canāt imagine it topped this. And I donāt mean seeing Patrick Stewart with hair. It's almost unbelievable how good I, Claudius is. It's straightforwardly one of the best pieces of TV drama ever produced anywhere. Without simply gushing, it's hard to explain just how good it is without simply sitting down and watching the damned thing. It's quite the technical accomplishment, also. One thing I noticed this time is just how long some of the scenes are - loads of dialogue filmed in takes with no cutaways, plus crowds of extras milling about potentially getting in the way of the camera movements. Only one writer for the whole series, too. |
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