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Jordan Peele's Twilight Zone

Started by Sin Agog, April 02, 2019, 06:32:41 AM

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Shaky

Well now... this new iteration of the show is actually rather good. Not epoch-shakingly amazing, but it certainly captures the spirit of the original better than the 80's and 00's ones. Episode 3 is quite on the nose but well acted and paced, with a central idea that certainly wouldn't have been out of place in the 60's.

Ant Farm Keyboard

In the sixties, the network wouldn't allow Serling to feature black people in episodes that handled racism. He had to cast Asian people instead.

BRen

Episode two was like one of those flip book versions of Lost in some ways, though I enjoyed it, think that's been my favourite of the the six episodes we've had so far.

SteveDave

I fell asleep in the one with Glenn from Walking Dead and Greg Kinnear but was told it was OK.

I liked the camcorder that fights racism one. It took me the whole of the episode to realise the cop was the killer from the first series of True Detective.

Ant Farm Keyboard

"Heavy-handed" can describe perfectly this week's episode, "Not All Men". It's basically about toxic masculinity being indeed toxic. Despite, once again, a terrific cast (Taissa Fermiga, Rhea Seehorn, Luke Kirby, Ike Barinholz), it just makes a statement about MRAs, Incels and the likes, the story never manages to develop its central characters and just moves from A to B before the obligatory twist, which packs zero punch. This is a "The rat symbolizes obviousness" situation.
At least, it was 42 minutes rather than 50, but it was one of the most disappointing one, along with the kid president one.

The thing I don't like in the new series is that it often fails to involve the audience. The original show would put you a week into the head of someone who turns out to be a bigot, forcing you to question your own prejudice. The new one is apparently watched by a liberal only audience, and it's never challenging or revelatory in that regard.

St_Eddie

Quote from: Ant Farm Keyboard on May 09, 2019, 05:16:10 PM
"Heavy-handed" can describe perfectly this week's episode, "Not All Men". It's basically about toxic masculinity being indeed toxic. Despite, once again, a terrific cast (Taissa Fermiga, Rhea Seehorn, Luke Kirby, Ike Barinholz), it just makes a statement about MRAs, Incels and the likes, the story never manages to develop its central characters and just moves from A to B before the obligatory twist, which packs zero punch. This is a "The rat symbolizes obviousness" situation.
At least, it was 42 minutes rather than 50, but it was one of the most disappointing one, along with the kid president one.

The thing I don't like in the new series is that it often fails to involve the audience. The original show would put you a week into the head of someone who turns out to be a bigot, forcing you to question your own prejudice. The new one is apparently watched by a liberal only audience, and it's never challenging or revelatory in that regard.

Indeed.  This whole thing is essentially Woke: The Series.  It's so on the nose and jerk off material for the already liberally enlightened.  The original Twilight Zone was fantastic in the way that it handled its social and political messages; those messages were there but they were weaved within the fabric of a story which could also be enjoyed on its own terms, whereas this new series is an embarrassment in just how heavy handed it is.  All the subtlety of a sledgehammer to the face.

neveragain

Weeeeeeeeeeelllllll, as much as I love the old Zone you have to admit (as Marc Scott Zicree does in his excellent guide to the series) that Serling could often be didactic.

St_Eddie

Quote from: neveragain on May 13, 2019, 12:32:38 AM
Weeeeeeeeeeelllllll, as much as I love the old Zone you have to admit (as Marc Scott Zicree does in his excellent guide to the series) that Serling could often be didactic.

Mate.  If anyone's a Marc Scott Zicree, it's you.

neveragain

I'll smile at that comment. Thank you.

Ant Farm Keyboard

Sure, it could be didactic, but at least (apart from season 4 or when it tried to be funny), it wasn't boring.

The thing that killed me in the newest episode is that, apart from being a nightmare for the two sisters and women in general, it makes almost no sense. How coud the entire male population of a small city decide to turn into pigs overnight, with everyone using the incident to the same end often by coincidence ? If there had been some well documented incident in which a few men had behaved badly, it could have inspired more men to do the same. Here, the guy from work doesn't handle rejection at all on the night of the meteors, but why does everybody else do exactly the same on the next day? Why are women immune to crowd mentality and don't have any manifestation of their own?

Ant Farm Keyboard

Massive improvement this week. The symbolism was quite on the nose, as it indeed could be in the original series, like neveragain reminded us, but they also approximated the creepiness and the uncanniness of the old show, something that they had failed to grasp last week.

McChesney Duntz

Apparently, at the end of this month, they'll be offering a black-and-white version of the new series, all the better to evoke the original. Kind of a neat idea - whether it actually works visually or winds up looking as awkward as movies shot for 2D retrofitted as 3D remains to be seen. But I approve of the notion.

St_Eddie

#42
Quote from: McChesney Duntz on May 18, 2019, 01:13:16 AM
Apparently, at the end of this month, they'll be offering a black-and-white version of the new series, all the better to evoke the original. Kind of a neat idea - whether it actually works visually or winds up looking as awkward as movies shot for 2D retrofitted as 3D remains to be seen. But I approve of the notion.

I can pretty much guarantee that it'll look like what it is; a gimmick.  Whilst one can desaturate the colour grade in post, one cannot undo the cinematography which was used during filming (at least not without resorting to prohibitively expensive and time consuming methods).  The show was lit for colour.  A true black & white picture requires its own discipline of cinematography to do it justice.  Whenever the colour is artificially drained from a picture (be it a film, a painting or a photograph), it usually ends up looking flat because shadow is utilised in the creation of black & white art, to give a sense of depth to the picture.

Ant Farm Keyboard

The Man Who Wasn't There and John Boorman's The General were shot on color film, but lit, as you say, for black and white copies. There are reasons for which they're almost never shown in colour (even if there are video masters, as requested by the production companies).

One film that still works in B&W is the black and chrome edition of Mad Max: Fury Road. But there's a lot of contrast in the original shots, given the desert setting, and Miller himself had such a version in mind when he shot the film, except that the studio wasn't too keen on releasing it in black and white.

Rev+

Quite a sweet final episode there, although the story was extremely slight and what they were up to was a little too easy to guess - a stance can be so revealing.

It's been watchable but more miss than hit for me, this one, but the second series will supposedly be entirely new stories rather than ones that feel the need to refer to old episodes, however obliquely.  It's an anthology show, it's better to have it around than not have it around.