Re. my mixed feelings on the first season and the show going forward...................

i finished the whole show. and it was good

it got to the point where every close up of amy brenneman or carrie coon would make me cry by the end.

i've thought she was great since gone girl. really magnetic screen presence, really committed to the bitterness and frustration of the character, but expressed naturally, which always hit against the melodramatic (in a good way) tone of the show in a really nice way. that's true of most of the actors, with the exception of the kids, who i never thought got to be especially good - barring tom's two hander with liv tyler last season. my god

yes ive seen OUATIH. yes i thought marg qualley was good in it

i want the cbox back tbh

international assassin. well.

it was kind of at a point in the show where i knew i found it really entertaining and couldn't wait to see where it was going. i was honestly very concerned about the fabric of its reality being totally torn by patti levin's ghost, and i knew the resolution to that would need to be something special. it was. every trip to the afterlife was really fun.

that said, when i saw we were going back to the well it was a little bit like when rick and morty did the interdimensional tv bit again - what was transcendent initially could be done a little too frequently !

and again i was really nervous about the direction of the show - season 2's climax was so satisfying that i knew to trust in the team and to not worry about what would occur - but global apocalypse still felt like too big a promise, or at least too goofy. so for the show to return to it and make it a weird shapeshifting doppelganger story... it really worked for me. and i thought the very ending, with the romance novel, was as moving as the karaoke scene

that's very reasonable boc

for me this show got at a lot of what i like about haruki murakami books... the sense that it may not be good in a strictly qualitative sense a lot of the time, but instead creates a mood and feeling and tangential, digressive structure that traps you.... characters trapped in the irrational and unexplainable and trying to bend it to what they can ~get~.

maybe not even just murakami books, but also LOST, which was i think subconsciously what season 2 was trying to top/parody?

i cant watch all those buzzworthy shows

the matt jamison furry fuckboat episode is just one of many all timers

i also ragged on the max richter score originally in the cbox. i now know the score wasnt bad at all, just the filmmaking relative to the score, and the frequency with which it was used.

season 2 got mimi leder as a sort of supervising director, which made for a much stronger show in the visuals, editing, and blocking, in contrast to peter berg's shifty sub-greengrass shakycam and fast cutting, which was always a terrible fit for richter's operatic sweep. now? those songs make me wanna cry.

oh hey, gerri from succession's in rectify. you guys should be watching that!

i dont like arrival that much but i do think the song is well used in it (if not better used in the fave SHUTTER ISLAND),

his style, and im no music critic, is just very baroque and very uhhhh serious. felt like in season 1 every conversation would bust out that piano. the more pop music began to enter in, the better the show got - the pop music would counter the seriousness of the richter and make it richer when it would come in.

i was actually shocked that where is my mind cover wasnt him, and that it got used on mr robot first (both of these shows are working off some fight club stuff lowkey i think)