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March 29, 2024, 01:57:14 PM

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Ricky Gervais - After Life [split topic]

Started by ramsobot, February 22, 2019, 05:39:11 PM

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Quote from: Armin Meiwes on August 07, 2019, 01:44:32 PM
Haha no chance

-Act 1 Scene 1 of AL series 2-

*Tony sat on his girlfriend's head farting away*

"Oh Tony I can hardly breathe but this is HILARIOUS, oh you ARE wonderful".

CUT TO: TONY watching this on laptop with a SAD SMILE. He can remember every one of those farts.

Cuellar

Hope it's 6 episodes of Maggie dancing around Gervais, drunk, going 'Ha ha your wife is DEAD haha your wife is DEAD hhaaaahahah'

Armin Meiwes

Should do a series collide episode where Derek loses his job at the old people's home and starts working in the post room at the local paper and Tony is really mean to him but then Derek teaches him #kindnessismagic and they become best friends.

madhair60

I hope it opens with Tony trying to rip a muslim woman's hijab off her head, biting his own lip hard enough to draw blood

thegammonboys

Derek 2050. Script.

Scene One

Big fat ugly Tony is plugged into VR machine masturbating again.

Derek: Why are yous doin' that? Your belly is covering the whole things. Look everyone, his winkle is too small and the mounds of fat are covering it. Everyone, it's like space beetle escaping from wet dirt.

Worker bot Kerry looks at camera 1. "HA. HA. HA. DEREK. YOU ARE MAD." Last remaining elderly look confused and play with hologram chess.

Scene Two

Evil new caretaker masturbating on VR machine to kitten being bummed. Wanks, stops, proceeds to laugh, wanks again. Repeat.

Derek: Dats not right what you're doing, we should take care of animals and be nice to them.

Caretaker: Hoos gonna stop meh? You? Yeh right.

Caretaker looks around for approval but remembers he's still watching bummed cat. Continues.

Derek clenches fists and chews VR wires. Shocked by electricity. Caretaker angry.

Caretaker gets up to hit Derek but slips on human fluid.

Derek looks at camera, shrugs. His hair is sticking up all funny and eyes have gone weird from electricity.

Derek: Be kind everyone.

Blue Jam

^^^ Appropriately enough, that sounds like how Gervais would do a rip-off of Dream Corp LLC, that very good show by He Who Must Not Be Named.

QDRPHNC

We all like to piss on Gervais for his New Atheism, but can you imagine how insufferable he's going to be when he inevitably discovers Alan Watts? Given that his mental age seems to be about 17, I'm placing it sometime in the next 5 years.

(I think Alan Watts is wonderful, by the way, but Gervais seems to have a tendency to get stuck in that first zealous flush of the new, and doesn't seem to have the intellectual curiosity to go much further than that).

Ferris

Quote from: QDRPHNC on August 08, 2019, 05:57:12 PM
We all like to piss on Gervais for his New Atheism, but can you imagine how insufferable he's going to be when he inevitably discovers Alan Watts? Given that his mental age seems to be about 17, I'm placing it sometime in the next 5 years.

(I think Alan Watts is wonderful, by the way, but Gervais seems to have a tendency to get stuck in that first zealous flush of the new, and doesn't seem to have the intellectual curiosity to go much further than that).

Imagine when he discovers Led Zeppelin

marquis_de_sad

Ricky Gervais has never pondered a koan because as soon as he hears the beginning he just thinks of a new, better one.

Glebe

So I finally watched it... it's a step up from gurning Derek and his robot dog, while still very obvious and on the nose, but fuck me, giving the bloke the money to do himself in with drugs... the way it's all glossed over and forgotten about and everything ends on a cheery, warm, redemptive note... bit odd, that. Didn't sit well with me at all.

PlanktonSideburns

mate in work watched it and thought it was fantastic, despite 'hating that cunt gervais' - i kept trying to remind him of the junkie bit, and despite being a 20 year life implosion style drug addiction survivor himself, did not care a shit for that. just related really hard with this bloke bollocking waiters for imaginary grievances, putting the world to rights. An extremely petty power fantasy, - like someone playing Grand Theft Auto, but just walking round berating people for not meeting his nebulous standards of behavior/manners


It feels like it was perfectly tuned to the metro reading 'people aren't polite like they were in the old day's', help for heroes 'pc gone mad' types. Death Wish for centrist conservatives

you could imagine any world you like as a writer, and this bloke decides to imprison himself in a world where the only person he likes is dead, and he goes round terrorizing perceived dickheads, threatening children and berating people working in the public service industry. and he gets a new girlfriend at the end. would be surprised if said girlfriend is still in a relationship with him for the new series, because then he would have to write a character that actually has a relation to him other than being an evil goblin that he has to stamp on, or some sort of sycophantic ipad dating game/prank-show app, or a fucking DOG

and NO I HAVEN'T WATCHED IT YET IAN, AND I NEVER WILL

My mum keeps telling me I need to watch this. She says it's fantastic.

Rock solid proof that this show is shite.

mojo filters

I dunno why the Gervais character giving junkie bloke the money to end it all is getting so much criticism? It seems like one of the (relatively) better fleshed-out and genuinely poignant elements, amongst a mostly poor plot and script.

It was in keeping with the internal logic at that point in the plot. If it had been done less ham-fistedly, it could have raised an interesting question around the actual morality of the act.

Junkie bloke was already taking his life into perilous circumstances through his own lifestyle, with the potential of said lifestyle to both accidentally or deliberately cause the premature death many in such circumstances succumb to.

Whether he is competent to make such choices living that way, could have been a legitimate question raised in a better written show that didn't cause so much continous cringing at the crassness!

What I found most frustrating was seeing how good the production values were, versus how unrefined the execution of the original concept is. The plotting and writing smack of sheer laziness.

It's as if Gervais was given a generous budget and total creative free rein, to write and produce a tight British six (acknowledgments to TWoP's Sarah D. Bunting for coining that phrase) part comedy. Then he came up with a general concept, and quickly and scrappily wrote just enough script to fulfil his brief / obligations.

I honestly have no idea how much the potential the premise of this show might have had. It just seems so painfully obvious that it could have been improved, with some critical input and overall refinement - before any principal photography and so forth.

I don't know if it's more arrogance or laziness on the part of Gervais, but it seems like regardless of which was the principle motivation - he just churned out exactly enough material from a vague concept he thought might be interesting, then proceeded directly to film his first pass and deliver it to Netflix.

I find it hard to believe he took the time to ask anyone remotely qualified to give some honest feedback. There are so many obvious small refinements that could have incrementally improved the finished product, even if that stil left the overall concept equally flawed, unrealistic and irritating.

When it first came out I have to admit that I thought Gervais actually had managed one smart move in the making of this: regardless of all the issues with the story arc, characters, setting, internal logic and dialogue, it seemed to be deliberately self-contained - ie the denouement appeared clearly second season-proofed.

The Gervais character's absurdly incongruous and swift change of heart in the final episode, quite clearly closed the loop of the trajectory of interest in his story.

Hence when the supposed success led to the announcement of a second series, that just really took the piss in terms of milking a bad idea, at further expense of any remaining artistic integrity, for money he clearly doesn't need!

idunnosomename

Quote from: FerriswheelBueller on August 08, 2019, 11:26:38 PM
Imagine when he discovers Led Zeppelin
maybe he'll discover wanking and we'll never hear from him again

Twit 2

Offing the junkie was pure Harold Shipman. A sociopath's notion of empathy. Chilling.

Cuellar

It was just so weird. Was it a point about euthanasia? If so, couldn't he have done it via a more traditional assisted dying candidate e.g. terminally ill, rather than a vulnerable addict?

mr. logic

The point is the moral dilemma therein. Somebody has no notions of a life without heroin, and has no interest in quitting. Is it kinder to preach, to sell them false dreams, or to just help them get more heroin? It was done way better in Trainspotting, but Ricky won't have read that, as he wouldn't have been able to resist reading it in his own voice. 

BritishHobo

It's a very good theory about him just churning out a first draft. The same idea came up during Derek, when he turned around the Christmas special/finale so quick it came out in the same year as series 2. There's also been a really short gap between him starting work on writing series 2, and him finishing the scripts. It's starting production very soon. To be honest I could see him as someone who gets it down on the page and that's him done.

QDRPHNC

Choose a religion. Choose a god. Choose to be fucking fat, Choose a sex change, being fat, being ginger, and not being as intelligent as me. Choose being a mong, fat and ginger. Ha-haaaaaaaa oh god.

Blue Jam

#979
After Life series 1 aired less than six months ago. Series 2 starts filming in four weeks:

https://mobile.twitter.com/rickygervais/status/1160951189233684480

Cute doggies, but yes, it would appear he is a lazy fucker hastily churning out scripts and not taking the time to get a second opinion before sending them in to Netflix.

Blue Jam

Why is he casting a new dog... Oh...

I was right: the doggo dies, then I guess Tony responds by going on another rampage of pettiness before getting a new doggo finally softens his heart.

CANINENESS IS MAGIC

Cold Meat Platter

He gets cancer but can only sustain the energy to beat it by being a wanker.

mojo filters

Quote from: mr. logic on August 14, 2019, 03:34:30 PM
The point is the moral dilemma therein. Somebody has no notions of a life without heroin, and has no interest in quitting. Is it kinder to preach, to sell them false dreams, or to just help them get more heroin? It was done way better in Trainspotting, but Ricky won't have read that, as he wouldn't have been able to resist reading it in his own voice.

I think everything heroin related was done better in Trainspotting. Even the first half of the film smartly captured yet made relatable the whole junkie situation. Sadly the second half just expanded one of the novel's many vignettes, into some dreary extended preachy tale of moral redemption, told via a cinematically clichéd narrative.

The Gervais seems to have failed to do even the most rudimentary research, for the purposes of realistic depictions of drug use in After Life. Unless you were so prudish to sacrifice realism for the sake of depicting a quasi "how to" guide to actual drug consumption, why portray satisfying heroin use via the weird notion of putting powder in the wasteful, unrealistic joint smoking scenario?

Gervais lazily used the clichéd "chase the dragon" phrase, then failed to follow through with any hint of realistically portraying the consumption method from which that phrase comes.

Maybe I just don't know enough about moneyed hard drug consumers, who can afford to consume such without regard to cost or effectiveness? It reminds me of that sad footage of Amy Winehouse smoking rocks, without properly inhaling or pausing her breath to get the proper effect.

The moral dilemma issue around junkie bloke was wasted in this show. Even the basics were flawed. Are we to assume he'd never had £60 before? He'd clearly previously contemplated the notion of suicidal ideation.

Are we supposed to believe it only took those brief, clunky and impersonal interactions with Gervais, for him to go from ideation to action?

There was an interesting moral dilemma to be explored, regarding whether there's any culpability in the Gervais character offering junkie bloke sufficient money to potentially top himself. Unfortunately the opportunity was completely wasted here, with no time dedicated to the delicate nuances.

Right or wrong, I thought Gervais giving him the money was one of the most interesting plot points in After Life. It was technically a passive move, which the most generous motive could interpret as misguided but well intentioned.

It's not like Gervais was shown as cooking up the gear, tapping the vein, nor plunging the barrel. His only encouragement was really just offering up the money, after being touched by a sad story. Are we to believe junkie bloke had never previously had enough cash from a giro or paycheck?

What annoys me most about After Life is the obvious amount of money spent on high quality production values. It contrasts so abrasively with the limp story and lazy script.

If there was one element that impressed me, it was that despite the annoying ending - it did seem to end with a substantial amount of finality.

I thought that was deliberately designed to preclude any notion of a second season. One strong identifiable quality amongst an otherwise paucity of ambition. Sadly I was quite wrong!

olliebean

I think I mentioned this before, but I definitely recall before season 1 came out seeing an interview in which Gervais said quite definitively that he'd written it as a one-off, one season thing and that was all there'd be. I guess he changed his mind when Netflix waved some more money at him.

MiddleRabbit

Re: the assisted suicide, I thought it wasn't the big deal it was made out to be.  Gervais's character was thinking about suicide but couldn't bring himself to do it.  The heroin fellow could bring himself to do it but didn't have the means to buy enough smack at once.  Sort of the same but opposite circumstance.

He gave the junkie enough money to buy enough smack to OD on.  He didn't have to buy smack with it, he was a grown up and had made his mind up.  He didn't seem to baulk when the opportunity to go through with it occurred, he said it and he meant it.  Gervais said it but didn't mean it.

Don't get me wrong, I thought it was cack on the whole, but not on account of my sense of morality being offended.

MiddleRabbit

Quote from: Twit 2 on August 14, 2019, 03:16:16 PM
Offing the junkie was pure Harold Shipman. A sociopath's notion of empathy. Chilling.

Shipman-esque, it certainly wasn't.  Shipman might have decided that the old duffers would be better off dead, but I don't get the impression that he was acting on any of his victims' explicitly expressed wishes.

As for the sociopath's notion of empathy, how do you feel about people who work at Dignitas?  I don't know, but I believe people who work there get paid, and the people who choose to end their lives there pay for it.  You could argue that Dignitas isn't altruistic on those grounds but Gervais's character was because he did something at cost to himself entirely for the 'benefit' of someone else.

Quote from: MiddleRabbit on August 27, 2019, 12:40:26 PM
Shipman-esque, it certainly wasn't.  Shipman might have decided that the old duffers would be better off dead, but I don't get the impression that he was acting on any of his victims' explicitly expressed wishes.

As for the sociopath's notion of empathy, how do you feel about people who work at Dignitas?  I don't know, but I believe people who work there get paid, and the people who choose to end their lives there pay for it.  You could argue that Dignitas isn't altruistic on those grounds but Gervais's character was because he did something at cost to himself entirely for the 'benefit' of someone else.

But Ricky's character doesn't work at Dignitas, he's a piece of shit who gives up on being responsible to others because he can't function in society but won't remove himself from it. In more capable hands it would be an interesting morality tale, but these are the hands that shaped Derke.

If a mentally vulnerable person expresses the wish to kill themself, you don't help them along. It's easy to rip the piss out of it because it's just one more example of the confused writing and muddled morality that Gervais excels at, but it really is fucking weird that as writer he thought this was an okay character development that shouldn't have any narrative consequence.

Jumblegraws

Just to add to what Old Gold Tooth said, prospective Dignitas clients go through several stages of consultation. The comparison with Gervais's character's actions doesn't hold up in the slightest. Add to that that the means of the death just so happened to be the mode of the character's drug addiction the capacity/agency behind the suicide becomes even more questionable.

MiddleRabbit

I'm not comparing Gervais's character to some sort of freelance Dignitas needle for hire.  I brought up Dignitas because Gervais was compared to Shipman which, in no shape, way or form is a valid comparison.  Dignitas is a valid comparison with Gervais, certainly better than comparing him with Shipman, for the reasons I set out - somebody told a man with money at, if they had enough cash, they'd kill themself.

We can talk about consultations all we like, but we're never going to get past the basic issue, which is that all people who are suicidal are mentally struggling and in terms of Dignitas at least, ultimately, somebody else is going to make the decision for them.  I suspect it's more about protecting Dignitas than it's some genuinely considerate plan for the individual.  And at least Dignitas and Gervais weren't inflicting their decision on anybody who hadn't already expressed a preference, unlike Shipman. 


QDRPHNC

At least Shipman ended suffering. Gervais is showing no signs of slowing down yet.