What are you currently watching on tv?

Non-anime/manga-related TV, movies, books, and comics, especially but not limited to pre-2000 titles
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greg
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Re: What are you currently watching on tv?

Post by greg »

You are right; Band of Brothers is just as good of quality as watching Saving Private Ryan, which is no wonder since it's Dreamworks that made I can't watch Band of Brothers here in town where I live because I can only rent it at the Tsutaya where my in-laws live. I saw that there is a bluray box set containing both Band of Brothers and The Pacific on Amazon. I am tempted to buy it, but I do not yet own a bluray player. I look forward to visiting my in-laws again just to rent more of this show.
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Re: What are you currently watching on tv?

Post by _D_ »

This should go over well in Japan:

http://filmreviewonline.com/2015/01/19/ ... racy-boys/

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio ... ids-review

Just watched the first 2 episodes. Fun stuff. Brings back a lot of memories. Guess there'll be an onslaught of new toys for this...

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Re: What are you currently watching on tv?

Post by _D_ »

Might also want to check out "Powers" on the Playstation network. Based on a US comic of the same name. Definitely not for kids though...
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Re: What are you currently watching on tv?

Post by _D_ »

Daredevil! Grim and gritty version. Definitely R-rated! Would be part of the Marvel mature line but very well done! On Netflix...
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Drew_Sutton
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Re: What are you currently watching on tv?

Post by Drew_Sutton »

davemerrill wrote:
greg wrote:I've finally discovered watching Band of Brothers. Produced by Tom Hanks and Stephen Spielberg, this is like watching Saving Private Ryan for hours on end. I missed this show originally because I did not have HBO, and here in Japan you can rent American TV shows. Heck, here you can rent movies period! We still have video rental stores here. Only the Tsutaya where my in-laws live has this series though. I've watched the first 3 DVDs, so that's 6 episodes so far. One of the captains is the actor from Office Space. I always wondered what happened to him, because I've never encountered him in other shows before. He's in this show, along with some others.
I really enjoyed Band Of Brothers; that's some excellent television right there. So many terrific actors, the scripts are tight, and the battle sequences rival just about every other war movie or TV show ever. At first I wanted the whole show to be about Ron Livingston's character (Nixon), but Damien Lewis really sells me with his Capt. Winters. The followup series "The Pacific" is also great; at points the grim depiction of the Pacific War was almost too much.
Another vote for Band of Brothers; I saw some "totally legit computer files" of it not long after it came out, that I replaced with DVDs at the first holiday opportunity. Been a bit since I've watched it but I absolutely love that series. I agree that I liked Nixon a lot but Winters grew on me. I think it's the ninth episode, where they come across the concentration camp, hit me exceptionally hard but it's my favorite episode by far probably for entirely special, personal reasons.

I tried to watch The Pacific but fell out of it because I wasn't making time for it; I'd like to go back and try to watch it again.
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My fiancee has read, I think, all of the books (the vast majority if not all of them) so she insisted we get STARZ when the show premiered. We watched all of the first season and just started the second season (which started last week). She is, absolutely obsessed, which is good. I like the show pretty well - I think the TV version is better than the books but I think that is just me. It's not really what I would look for in an SF/fantasy story but the characters are well written and they took a lot of steps to get the author involved in development of the series, so it works really well.
_D_ wrote:Daredevil! Grim and gritty version. Definitely R-rated! Would be part of the Marvel mature line but very well done! On Netflix...
Is that where it is? I've been seeing FB posts from friends but I'm sick of all of the comic book movie stuff all over social media but that is probably more me being a curmudgeon than anything else. However, I've had a soft-spot for Daredevil, especially the stories I read in the 80s and 90s. Maybe I will check this out tomorrow if it's on Netflix.

Aside from Outlander, the only other appointment television we have is MadMen on Sundays. MadMen is, in my opinion, the best show on television. Looking forward to and simultaneously dreading the series finale this year.
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Re: What are you currently watching on tv?

Post by _D_ »

Game of Thrones starts up again tomorrow. Mad Men isn't my thing. Nor was Breaking Bad, The Sopranos and a host of others. I love genre shows but those mentioned are not typically my genre...
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Re: What are you currently watching on tv?

Post by llj »

I finished off season 1 of the 1960s Mission Impossible. I have had the DVDs lying around for almost 10 years now but it's taken me a while to go through it.

This show is sort of a forerunner to modern crime shows in that in every episode, the case always takes precedence over character. The actors pretty much have to make do with the little moments to build their character, because these aren't character driven shows. Watching this show, I always found it funny that the IMF team devised these over-elaborate plans for relatively simple missions. In some cases it makes sense to cover their tracks AS WELL AS complete their missions, but in other cases you think there is a serious inefficient use of resources with all the equipment they use to complete a simple task.

There are some pretty nice guest stars throughout the show. Eartha Kitt (possibly the most remembered Catwoman in the 60s Batman) was a major guest in one episode later in the season...she plays a diminutive IMF agent tasked with crawling through a building's ventilation system to steal some stuff. This is prime Eartha Kitt here, physically. Compact and muscular and flexible. In the show, she looks about 5' but apparently she wasn't THAT small when I checked Wikipedia. 1.63m, which is just a shade under average height for many women. But since everyone in the show is pretty tall (including Barbara Bain, who's a shade taller than the average woman at 5'7), Eartha looked small in comparison. Nice use of camera angles and scale here too.

One of the cool things about the show was that every character was a crucial cog in an elaborate machine. If even one of them goofed up their role, the whole mission would fall apart. So by relying so much on these characters, you really get the sense that these are extremely competent agents who are very good at their jobs. One of the problems with the Cruise movies was that they went away from the teamwork aspect until arguably Ghost Protocol (although Cruise still did his comical He-Man thing in the final battle)

That said, all you really need is one season of this show to get what you need from it. Like most formula shows of this type, it's the same thing over and over with only a few nuances every season. The theme song is still one of the coolest theme songs ever composed. Most TV shows now simply license songs from bands as their theme songs, the era of the distinctive theme song is dead, which is sad.
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Re: What are you currently watching on tv?

Post by _D_ »

Julie Newmar was the definitive Catwoman. She was in 13 episodes of Batman vs. Kitt's 5. Even Lee Meriwether who played Catwoman in the Batman movie is fondly remembered. I don't recall Kitt at all but my memory of the show is hazy. i havent watched it in 10 years. Meriwether was also in Irwin Allen's Time Tunnel as well as did guest appearances in Mission Impossible just for reference. She's still working according to Imdb. I guess I must go watch the Batman series again. I got it during the recent Target liquidation sale for a measly $40, marked down from $300!
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Re: What are you currently watching on tv?

Post by llj »

Kitt was hyped up a lot, even though she came nearer the end of the show. She already was a significant name before she took on the role. Plus, her skin color probably had a lot to do with the hype as well during that time.

I don't know if Newmar was better known before being on the show. I know today Kitt gets name dropped a lot more often than Newmar. Probably because of a more memorable and "Cat-like" name, to be honest.
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Re: What are you currently watching on tv?

Post by _D_ »

I think Kitt does a lot of conventions these days. That's why she is fondly remembered. Newmar might do them as well but if she lives and works in California it might be she isn't going to do them outside that area. Lots of actors/actresses like that.
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