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Just watched first 3 episodes great idea and production values ,looks nice.

 

I watched the first three last night and it's an interesting premise which began to drag a bit. Nice production values, yes. But the overly diffuse look annoys me a bit. Lots blooming highlights and it just feels like hard light would have been more thematically appropriate considering the subject matter.

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@Bill, those thinking on The Man in The High Castle.

 

The look is quite diffuse isn't it. The intro rocks. Contrasty, crisp, and also expressing a lot of the core ideas. Then the look shifts. I wasn't sure if it was just the particular stream I was watching, but actually it's been quite consistent.

I wandered through all the way to e10. Initially, at e1,2, I responded with thoughts about parallel universes. Physics I suppose. Just me amusing myself perhaps. But by e10 I felt that the creators/writers were interested in that too. Yay.

So who or what is the man in the high castle? If he is just the end, destination, recipient of the subversive films? Then he is Hitler? Or, is "the man in the high castle" an expressive phrase to convey the sense that there is a sentient element in the global process, actively enabling or riding the interaction between these parallel universes.

So it could still be someone in particular.

 

Sir Riddler has his beautifull Scott Free notion (producer logo) all over the place for some time. I read an interview a while ago where he said he just wanted to turn up the volume, do more. I would be happy if he just gave us one last master work comparable in some way to Bladerunner.

 

 

Edited by Gregg MacPherson
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Master of None has a very interesting look reminiscent of Louie. Very still life and natural which you don't actually experience too often I feel.

I would argue the opposite. Louis looks "natural". At times it borders on being a little too low con but Master of None looks very dramatic and I don't know if it suits the material.

 

Even it's 2:35 aspect ratio feels kinda wrong. I'm not sure I see the logic to making a comedy show like that or Flight of the Conchords, Garfunkel & Oates etc. into looking like a Fincher movie. I'm all for breaking convention now and then but the style of a show should go unnoticed and I think when it gets in the way ya gotta dial it back a bit.

Edited by Michael LaVoie
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Master Of None is really damn good, love the aspect ratio, adds a lot to it.

 

The best show on TV right now however by far is The Leftovers, if you're not watching it, you have no idea what you're missing + it's beautifully shot, unlike anything I've ever seen on the Alexa.

 

About Narcos and other Netflix original shows, they're all shot on the Red Dragon as Netflix asks for 4K deliverables. Daredevil looks fantastic, so does Jessica Jones.

 

Other great shows on TV: The Walking Dead (obviously), The Affair, The Last Man On Earth, Ash Vs Evil Dead, etc

Edited by Manu Delpech
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I don't know if you're basing your opinion on the first season or not?! Season 1 was excellent if you were into it, but season 2 is on a whole other level, the new setting and fact that it's completely original as they exhausted all the content from the book really freed Lindelof.

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Several years old now but I just finished watching all 7 episodes of Black Mirror, British speculative sci fi at its best. Great in every sense, even if the whole series didn't have the budget of a single episode of some US shows.

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Just took a look at London Spy. How to describe it? A finely nuanced, textured observational piece that could be called a gay spy story I supose. Bridget Jones's dad does a great turn, and in eo2, Charlotte Rampling takes the stage. She's fantastic.

 

The whole seems more than the sum of the parts. A complement.

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I watched the first three (episodes of The Man in The High Castle) last night and it's an interesting premise which began to drag a bit.....

Bill, to be fair, I was the same. But I like the idea so much I gave it a pass, checked my email etc and kept going. I really wanted it to succeed.

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I have been revisiting older programs, and am currently on the 8th season of "The Andy Griffith Show".

 

The switch to color was a jar, not because of the color, but because it took me two or three episodes to realise they rebuilt the entire set!

 

The previous black and white footage, I assume being data scanned now is some of the most exceptionally sharp, crisp and full of depth black and white pictures I have seen in television.

Most of the time it has a very deep focus aspect. Everything is in focus. They have issues with color medium close ups and trying to soften the female faces, but on medium and wide shots

it's a clear as any digital image.

 

I've only seen one boom and one flag adjustment in 8 seasons, which is pretty good! I"m also glad they didn't (unlike the X-files) RE-frame everything for 1.78....

Last night I noticed they very well could have re-framed the entire episode as there was generous headroom and negative space all around the TV safe area.

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"River" (out of the UK) on Netflix has gotten my attention.

 

 

And Dr Who has gotten very nice looking considering the humble beginnings.

 

 

 

 

an aside for Mr Mullen

Space 1999? great miniature work, especially for the era. Howabout UFO?

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I haven't seen much of "UFO" and I don't think it is on blu-ray in HD, unlike Season 1 of "Space: 1999" (I hear rumors of a Region-2 blu-ray of Season 2 for "Space: 1999" coming out in the U.K. but not here.) "UFO" played here in the U.S. but it didn't get the same promotion.

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I have been revisiting older programs, and am currently on the 8th season of "The Andy Griffith Show".

 

 

I've tended to avoid most of TV shows until the 'modern age'... even 'Star Trek: The Geriatric Generation'... my TV viewing in the era was skewed by the fact that were I lived I could only get the ABC affiliate, and so, while I have fond memories of such shows as 'Batman'... or the like... I've not had any inclination to revisit them... in my teens I moved into the city... and had 3 local stations, and if I adjusted my antenna right, I could bring in LA stations... so, I found that I could watch a number of late night movies from the 30's-50's in full blazing Black and White... color TVs... that's what rich people had...

 

But even now, when in a hotel I'll tend to the movie stations, even if they are cluttered up with ads... cut for 'the children' per FCC rules, etc... rather than watch network TV shows... Although shows like "Blacklist", are cracking my dislike for network shows. I did watch "Mad Men"(for the AMC network) for the first 3-4 seasons, via Blurays, but I've not kept up with the later seasons.

 

But the shows I'm more impressed with are the the shows produced for cable distribution, and now more towards the so called Over The Top (OTT) distribution, such as HBO content, Starz, etc.

 

I have also watched a CBS show, "Blue Bloods", a show depicting a NYC 'cop family'... the situations have too 'pat' setups and resolutions, and I can see why perhaps some 'oldsters' may like it as it has Tom Selleck in a lead role... but I'm not anxiously awaiting the next season...

 

"Game of Thrones" on the other hand... I'm both waiting for the next season, but also the next book installment...

 

Ok, I did watch ABC's "Once Upon a Time" for several seasons, but I viewed that as a train wreck in 22 or so seasonal episodes...

 

And I did watch ABC's "Switched at Birth", but in that case I watched it for how the show presented deaf/hard of hearing people as well as the mixing of ASL with voice dialog. Absent those features, it would have been an ordinary TV show with perhaps a bit of 'otherside of the tacks'-ness mixed in...

Edited by John E Clark
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I'm watching a little of Band Of Brothers. I've seen it end to end about three or four times. I think it's a great achievement. As a (sequential) piece of film it connects art, and life. Technique is somewhere in the middle of those two. The Cpt. Winters character ...the intro montage...I'm in awe...

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As a series, "Band of Brothers" is one of the most well-written & superbly acted mini-series to run on TV in the last 20 years.

 

Regarding the cinematography, I wasn't crazy about it when I first saw it but it grew on me. I expected a more gritty look considering the subject matter, but perhaps Spielberg felt it was time for a different look since he'd already done that with "Saving Private Ryan." But to me, there was a bit too much of digital cleanliness to the look of "Band of Brothers" (all done in the grading, I believe, since digital cameras were still no match for film.) And in retrospect, that seems to have been the beginning of period pieces having a very grainless, digital look. And I have trouble watching period pieces - especially war films - that have that kind of visual appearance because it takes me out of the story. I have yet to watch "Unbroken" because of this. I know it's a visual bias and I do eventually watch the films, but when you are telling a powerful true story and it just doesn't feel visually genuine, I feel that you are not doing justice to whatever the story is.

 

But as you say, "Band of Brothers" transcended this because of how powerful the stories were.

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Returning to The Leftovers S02 E08 and 9. To me it feels as if the writers/concept people are exploring random, divergent possibilities.

 

There has to be some degree of trust when you suspend disbelief.

 

In spite of Manu's enthusiastic endorsement I'm not convinced.

 

If one is looking for profundity, there's more of that in Grantchester than The Leftovers. Deeply steeped character expanding on insights into our nature vs wonky (bad) idea driven over constructed.....

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