What are you watching in (late 2025 and) 2026?

payn said:

Train Dreams recently and its a must see. Full of ambiance and reflection a movie that will make you feel which is oh so very rare these days. Its a crime that Edgerton didn't even get nominated for an Oscar.

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That's on Netflix, right? I want to watch it, and it and Sentimental Value are the Best Picture nominees which I haven't seen yet and are on services I have.

I've only seen Sinners, OBAA, and Frankenstein of the nominees this year.

payn said:

I do love Jon Bernthal though.

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He's an actor I've really turned around on. My initial reaction was "Ugh I hate this guy", because he played a series of intensely annoying twats and made sure to make them REALLY annoying and frustrating.

But it was as an intensely annoying twat role he turned me around, which was The Punisher. I mean, I hate The Punisher, he's not a superhero in most older incarnations, he's just a weird Boomer revenge-fantasy (and the comics were frequently borderline or even outright racist and misogynist), so when I saw reviews saying "Omg he gives The Punisher emotional depth and makes him seem like a real person", I was like "Yeah, right, whatever". But then I watched it. And he did. And I admit I was impressed, because wasn't just a jerk, or a kind of hollow shell like the Person of Interest guy increasingly became as the series went on (talking of Boomer revenge-fantasies - the emotional weight of that show was carried entirely by the supporting cast, particularly after S1), there was something there.

Since then I've seen him in more roles and liked him. Honestly he needs to do a good rom-com, I think he'd be great. He can definitely do comedy.

Re: what am I watching? Mostly a lot of Drag Race, catching seasons my wife and I hadn't seen. I'm currently failing to watch a lot of good shows I need to catch up on like Slow Horses.

Cadence said:

Blue Lights is at the other end from R&T in terms of grit (albeit nothing like Luther). And Belfast's (TV at least) police experience is much different than Taggart's Glasgow, Morse's Oxford, or any of the others. The latest episode "The Parting Glass" was very, very good.

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I mean, it is different to Taggart but there's something about it that did bring Taggart to mind for me - maybe just the grit? That said I haven't watched Taggart in well over 20 years so YMMV. The closest show is probably Line of Duty, especially as it also has a bit of flair for the melodramatic and really loves some jargon and procedure, though it doesn't reach the true heights of ludicrous melodrama and dead cops everywhere that Line of Duty does (I say that with complete love for LoD, but stuff like the hand thing in S4 is so er... heavy-handed... and implausible it becomes kind of funny - I will never not live for stuff like "Urgent exit required." or that Jimmy Saville jumpscare though). Luther isn't so much gritty as a form of modern-day grimdark, it's just excessive and silly (but that is not entirely unintentional - I mean that was a show about a metaphorical "cop on the edge" which opened with him literally standing on the edge of a building, but honestly Garth Marenghi only gets more right as time goes on).

I recently watched all of S1 of Blue Lights, which was straight-up great, nearly finished S2 started off a bit weaker and I think got a little too copaganda/excuses excuses at times, which is kind of antithetical to the gritty vibe, but in the last couple of episodes it's started to pull itself back together (one to go). Will definitely get to S3 eventually.

Mostly watching Ashes to Ashes at the moment - I only saw the last season mostly when it was on TV back in 2008-10 so it’s been fun to watch what I missed.

For those who don’t know, AtA is the sequel and finale series to Life on Mars, a 2006 UK TV series about Sam Tyler, a modern detective (DCI - detective chief inspector) in Manchester who is KO’d on the job and wakes up in 1973 as sidekick to DCI Gene Hunt, who is as chauvinistic and lawless as any 70s TV police detective you could hope for (he’s mainly a reference to TV detectives from The Sweeney at the time). Sam befriends Hunt, hangs around in 1973 for a while, then wakes up back in 2006 long enough to tell his story to a police psychologist before going back.

Ashes to Ashes is about DI Alex Drake, the aforementioned psychologist, who is shot in 2007 and wakes up in London in 1981, finding herself Hunt’s sidekick since he’s moved there. She has a lot of mystery to explore - what happened to Sam Tyler? How real is this? Can she save her parents from being killed when she was a kid? WTF is going on anyway? - and she does her best, and it’s pretty fun to watch. There’s a lot of 2000s nostalgia about it for me, remembering when the world and the UK made a lot more sense. Before Brexit, before Covid, before the dark times. OTOH it means there’s a certain amount of end-of-history smugness about Alex.

One thing that’s interesting on this sort of rewatch is that I’ve seen the ending (which is fantastic) and so I know what’s going on, and I know Gene’s secret. And it makes a lot of sense in retrospect - it explains his obvious idealism (never more than a millimetre beneath his cynicism), his instinctive respect for authority, and his incredibly solid moral core and infallible sense of duty. Hunt is a good choice for his role.

It’s also fun to see actors in roles that echo future roles for which they might be a bit more famous. Shaun Evans plays a DC, echoing his future role as young Morse in Endeavour, and Roger Allam plays his boss. Both Keeley Hawes (Alex) and Daniel Mays will soon be in Line of Duty.

We just watched Lady Hawke the other night. Haven't seen it since the 90s, on a CRT TV, and...it really holds up as a piece of art. Weird, dated art, but the vibes are strong.

We also finished watching Bob Appétit, Your Majesty...komd of a toxic relationship, weak ending, fun cooking scenes, satisfactory bloodbath of vengeance near the end.