I heard those complaints were based off of not the actual subtitle track, but off of closed captioning subtitles which are transcriptions of the english audio track, which make adjustments for different things, which isn’t at all unexpected.
In any case, I was watching with german subtitles.
It’s also because the CC track is much more interpretive than a straight subtitle track, too - the english subs are apparently about as good at Netflix subs ever get, and the dub is relatively reasonable*.
*-And I mean actually relatively reasonable, not wierdo anime snob damning-with-faint-praise reasonable.
I enjoyed the first half of it. The sets are great and the beginning premise works well, but they stray from it.
The English bothered me, though. The first character who speaks English is fine; the English speakers who came in at the end clearly had their dialogue written by a Korean person and it was never run by an English speaker. Nobody talks like that.
And since there’s a lot of comparisons to Kaiji, there was also a distinct lack of whatever the Korean equivalent to zawa is.
Watching Foundation, and every episode gives me this feeling that despite things happening on-screen, nothing is really happening, which I think suggests a pacing problem. There are a lot of filler-y moments that don’t create atmosphere. I get that characters aren’t a strength in the books, so hire writers who can build meaningful characters. The framing/writing/directing of a certain group of people in the most recent episode is cringy brown-people-is-terrorist-wave-gun-make-shout. And suicidal ideation is not a substitute for well-written grief. I want to enjoy this show; I eagerly await each episode and feel disappointed each time.
I haven’t seen the newest episode of Foundation yet, but so far, I’m not particularly interested in anyone in the Foundation, which should clearly be the focus of the show and goes to a problem with the writers being unable to make compelling characters. All I want is more of the Empire.
Lee Pace and Terrance Mann are just outstanding as Emperors Day and Dusk.
I watched one episode of Squid Game. It is, as people have said, a live action Korean adaptation of Gambling Apocalypse: Kaiji. The main difference being that it doesn’t have that long drawn out manga pacing or the over the top humor. It also has a more Battle Royale/Hunger Games aesthetic.
The only thing is that I have seen a lot of negative comments about the subtitles being meh, so I’m not sure if I really want to watch the rest until maybe that’s resolved somehow.
I haven’t watched Squid Game, but apparently most of the negative comments are from people who were watching the show with the closed captions turned on instead of watching the show with English subtitles. People don’t seem to realize that there’s a difference between the two.
While both are in English, the CCs are not as thorough as the subtitles. The subtitles may not be perfect either, but the majority of complaints are about the CCs.
I heard that also, but this is the primary source of the complaint, and the person clearly has the actual subtitles on.
I started on Ted Lasso tonight. Only three episodes in, but I’m probably going to finish the first season over the weekend, if not already tomorrow. It is great.
I feel like I am repeating myself here, but I’ve completed the two seasons that are out so far and I just have to write a full thing on it. Ted Lasso is so good, just watch it.
The show is about an american football coach who goes to England to coach the type of football were you actually regularly kick a ball with your foot. This engenders a bit of fish out of water scenario which is actually more of a metaphor in a way, as what makes the character of Ted Lasso more interesting is that he isn’t some screaming authoritarian or manipulative tactician as would be the archetypes. He hardly even knows the rulse of football. Instead he is a kind of empath who motivates his players through quirky mannerisms and genuinely caring and connecting with them. A problem solver if you will. I discribed it to my friends as “Ned Flanders coaches football”, though of course, that doesn’t necessarily endear him to the fans of the team.
The initial reason for him being hired though is a bit sinister, as the freshly divorced owner of the fictional AFC Richmond wants to get back at her former husband by destroying the club from the inside, Lasso being her unwitting pawn she understestimated. This plot point very much reminded me of the film Major League.
Together with a rich cast of other characters surrounding the team, this comedy show definitely also had some genuine character growth within it and people dealing with their personal shortcomings and evolving through that (or sometimes devolving, which makes it more interesting). Nevertheless this show is also incredibly funny and gave me several moments where I actually had to pause the show because I was laughing so hard. The show also takes a number of unexpected risks which may not directly succeed but are interesting to observe.
I also can’t help but compare it to one of my favorite TV shows of all time, Scrubs. Both are single-camera comedies of course, but more directly one of the co-creators of Scrubs, Bill Lawrence, is a co-creator of Ted Lasso. Zach Braff who starred as JD in Scrubs and directed seven episodes of the series also directed the second episode of Lasso. Unfortunately, those are the only direct connections I could find, but given that both shows have very quirky and reference-ladden dialogue I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more. The biggest difference is that there are almost no imagination sequences in Lasso, but it still has plenty of weird moments in it as well.
Great summary/overview without spoiling anything. If someone has been living under a rock or not sure if Ted Lasso is worthy of the buzz, it totally is.
I am genuinely unsettled by what occurred with Nathan over season two. On the one hand, that character was such a great example of how Ted interacts with people in season one and believes in them and gives them a chance to explore their potential. And it is mostly believable that a person who has been bullied and doesn’t have a lot of self-confidence can over-correct when allowed the opportunity due to insecurity and promulgating the behavior they previously experienced. However, the degree to which he became a total shit, and with no obvious precipitating event that was shown on-screen, was both confusing and mildly disturbing in a show that in virtually all other aspects goes out of its way to show people being kind and empathetic and good humans.
I get that the point is that he has misinterpreted the goings on of people around him, but I must have missed the things he experienced that could be misinterpreted. Instead it just feels like they decided to write him as a bad guy douche-bag without explanation so they could make him this opposing force or threat.
I was chatting with a friend recently who only just started season two and made the comment that I appreciated season one more, but that is less because season two is bad and more that season one is damn near television perfection.
While I agree that Nathans de-evolution could have been executed better (which is one of the experiments I mentioned that don’t quite pan out, I think you are a bit unkind. All of the steps are there, including parts of Season 1 where Nathan is introduced including his difficult of connecting with people and his deep desire to get approval, is finally given a chance, is made to read out his true feelings to the players, and promoted to coaching staff.
In season 2 we see him have genuine success, only for it to let it go to his head because it validated what he always believed: That he could be better and find admiration, but his circumstances were holding him back. With that he grows resentful even when he is listened to because he isn’t the one who made the decision, and of course he externalizes failures to other people.
They could have done a better job stringing these steps together, but the character arc is definitely there and not just completely abrupt. I do agree that the de-evolution of his character is unsettling, but I also believe it is supposed to be, as a contrast to everybody else in the show. It does feel a bit utilitarian though to set up a villain for season 3.
I’ve recently become low-key obsessed with the original British version of Taskmaster which is apparently entirely being put onto YouTube.
For those unfamiliar, the show is a comedy panel show where the Taskmaster (Greg Davies) gives various weird tasks to five competitors which they have to complete. The competitors are usually british comedians with the same five competitors in each episode of a season which is five to ten episodes long. They are also assisted by the Taskmaster’s secretary, Alex Horne (who is actually the creator of the show). These tasks can range from “eat this egg, fastest wins” to “here is a GPS tracker, draw a picture, the Taskmaster judges whose is best”. Usually with some innovative and out of the box thinking involved in how to tackle the task best.
The tasks are largely prerecorded with a studio show as framing where the competitors and the two showrunners banter back and forth on their approaches and how they did it. There is also always the prize task where each competitor brings an item that is awarded as a prize to the winner of the episode, and the final task which is a task that is solved live in the studio. I was already familiar with the concept as LoadingReadyRun had borrowed it on occasion, but it has also been adapted by TV stations of various other countries. Deservedly so as the show is an absolute hoot to watch.
There’s a new Wheel of Time trailer out this week. This show looks like it’s going to be so good. Just 3 more weeks until the first batch of episodes come out.
Just going to chime in and say Ted Lasso is fantastic. I’d say if you love The Good Place, you’ll likely love it too.
My expectations are super low, but I’m cautiously optimistic.
Nuri and I watched S2 of Another Life this weekend and, overall, it remained an extremely mediocre show. It never really did a lot that I would call particularly bad, at least not for serialized scifi drama, but it never did anything I thought was particularly different than any other SF show.
It could have, too, that’s the annoying part. It was set up to take it in an interesting direction, but instead stuck hard with the anti-colonizer theme - which to be fair is a good thing to do, but they do it in a way that is extremely well-trodden already. They had potential to show the political complexities of imperialists messing in foreign affairs, but instead the bad guys were just straight up bad guys and the imperialists were right to meddle.
They do at least touch on the nature of colonizers in extremely overt ways - “the first stage of colonization is giving gifts, and then it’s all the way down to genocide” - so that was good, and I guess there’s some cool tech.
But in the end, I think it was more ideas crammed into one show than they could manage, and so they never really did any of those ideas justice. A bucket full of tropes that never really made anything more out of itself.
Also, I ultimately found Katee Sackhoff’s character to be flat and predictable. She’s The Commander who has to make The Hard Choices and will Make The Ultimate Sacrifice for her crew…but she sacrifices herself like 10 separate times in the show so it loses impact. And at one point another character even tells her “yo you have a daughter and skilled subordinates, let us handle this so your kid’s not an orphan” and it still doesn’t sink in.
I was kinda hoping they’d do deep space exploration and unravel the mystery of the antagonist and what they want and their clearly deep and complicated history of galactic politics, but nope, the bad guy is bad and they need to get back to Earth to fight them.
C+. It passes, but not gracefully.
You really need to see For All Mankind on Apple TV. It’s phenomenal. I know Ted Lasso gets all the attention and love, but this show is the best TV show that no one is talking about.
Ronald Moore burned a bridge with BSG.