Re: What Did You Watch? 2025-01-18 (Saturday)

On 1/19/2025 9:10 AM, Ian J. Ball wrote:

Yesterday was 1) football, and 2) streaming TV series. I barely got to soaps:
 soaps: Y&R - I guess Wed's(?) ep. Claire makes a bunch of admissions about the Newmans (e.g. how they *are* horrible people!) to Aunty Jordan but I couldn't tell if Claire was just feeding Jordan a line, or whether Claire actually believes what she says and secretly despises Victor and the Newmans. The rest of this was Sally-Adam & Billy-Chelsea redux... meh.
 football - In the afternoon game, while Houston tried to make a go of it in the first half, as expected they were ultimately overwhelmed by Kansas City (who is cruising to another Super Bowl appearance at this rate).
    The evening game was a pathetic disappointment as the Lions utterly choked against Washington.
    Now I am down to the Rams as the only NFC team I care about...
 On Call (Prime) - I finally finished this show out. I'm not sure the second 4 episodes were as strong as the first 4 episodes, as the show seemed to go quickly over-the-top towards the end (e.g. PLL bitch! uses a live weapon on the streets for the first time, rookie gets shot (but was vested)). And I'm not sure I cared for the "Reset Button" they hit at the end, esp. because I don't think this show has been renewed yet, so if it ends here it will be an unsatisfying ending... I did like how Eriq La Salle ended up not being PLL's (bitches!) enemy.
    But if they did do a second season of this show, I would watch it.
 Silo (Apple TV+) - Got through the first 4 episodes of season #2 of this.
    This is definitely a show in which it would drive me crazy to not "binge" it - for example, Rebecca Ferguson wasn't in ep. #2.2 at all, and this kind of thing drives me nuts when watching a show week-to-week.
    Anyway, Ferguson's Juliette makes her way over to one of the other silos (Silo 15, I think they said) at this season's start. We are shown in the premiere's opening sequence that in this silo there was a revolution (because the silo had already failed?), and they all went to the surface, where they all died. Luckily for Juliette, they hadn't managed to close all of the silo doors, so she gets herself in, closing the vault door behind her. The silo seems utterly abandoned... but is it?!
    Back in Silo (17?), Tim Robbins continues to lie, and plot, and scheme. Meh - I generally don't care for this storyline, because what Robbins does continues to be counterproductive - he is even told as much by the judge lady (Tanya Moodie). And he keeps screwing over Common, which also seems to be plying with fire.

Not just Common, Common's wife is taking things personal too...

    Meanwhile, Shirley and "Mechanical" (i.e. Engineering) move closer to outright rebellion over Juliette's fate, so Tim Robbins frames them for a heinous crime.
    Back in the abandoned silo, Juliette discovers a single survivor, an apparently somewhat crazy dude, self-named as "Solo" (Steve Zahn).
    We'll see where they go from here, but the show continues to be stingy with backstory which I think is starting to work against it rather than "heightening the mystery"...
 

I feel (or felt) your pain.  Being forced to wait week to week for the next episode was painful.  Silo is definitely a binge worthy show.  I just lacked the will power to wait.  While this season absolutely is slow and stretches things out way too much, it is also very entertaining when it wants to be and will be worth watching in spite of the slow plotting.  And since you're binging it anyway, you probably won't feel it nearly as much as those of us who had to wait every week for the next drop of plot.

What did you watch?
 

I decided to watch movies from the 1940s by watching:
His Girl Friday (4K disc) 1940 comedy directed by Howard Hawks and starring Cary Grant as a newspaper editor who cooks up a scheme to trick his ex-wife (Rosalind Russell) to continue working at his newspaper instead of running off to get married to Ralph Bellamy.  Between running cons on Russell, Grant keeps framing Belamy for minor crimes.  In the backdrop of all of this Russell is investigating an upcoming execution which is politically motivated due to the killer (who may be mentally incompetent) shooting a Black police officer and the governor needing the Black vote to get reelected not stopping the execution.  I found the humor for 1940 to be pretty good.  At one point I had to rewind it back to confirm what I heard.  Grant's character is talking to someone about Bellamy's character and is asked, what does he look like.  Grant says, he looks like that guy from the movies, Ralph Bellamy.  Now I recognized Bellamy's name in the credits because he starred in "Trading Places," but I didn't know he was famous enough that you could make a joke about him in 1940.  This is one of those old movies with lots of fast talking, and people talking over each other.  Even with subtitles it was hard to follow the dialogue at times.  I never saw this movie (or heard of it) before now.  But it's another movie in one of the 4K box sets I own. And I'm determined to watch all the movies in those box sets.  Overall, it wasn't bad.  And today I plan to finally watch the rest of the movies (dramas and romantic comedies) in the set that I haven't gotten around to yet.
Casablanca 1942 (4K disc) - The classic movie starring Humphrey Bogart as an American nightclub owner in German occupied Casablanca during WWII.  Bogart gets torn between helping his former lover and staying out of the way of the Nazis.  Probably the most shocking thing about this movie was the discovery that there was gambling taking place in Rick's nightclub.  This movie is not part of any box set.  I just happen to like the movie so I bought it.  And now I had a good excuse to watch it.   This was my first time watching this disc and as I put the disc in, I was hoping there would be a commentary, and it turns out there is a commentary, two in fact, with one being from Roger Ebert.  Ebert does great film commentaries and this was no exception.  He gave an in-depth commentary about the making of the movie and all the historic events that was taking place at the time the movie was made. He talked a lot about the production code of the time and what was and wasn't censored as a result.  He said Warners were very anti-Nazi, before being anti-Nazi was fashionable.  And almost the entire cast and all the extras were made up of real refugees from Nazi Germany (or invaded countries) and in the scene where the nightclub patrons sing to drown out the Nazis, the tears in the extra's eyes were real.
I was going to try to squeeze in "The Maltese Falcon" before watching Casablanca, but when I went to watch it I discovered it wasn't available to stream for free on any of the usual streaming channels. Oh well.  I didn't really have time to watch it anyway.
The Big Sleep (TCM) 1946 directed by Howard Hawks. The movie stars Humphrey Bogart as a detective hired to look into a blackmail scheme.  I saw this once before but didn't remember it all that well.  I had the movie sitting on my DVR for over a year.  It would have ended up getting deleted unwatched if I didn't have Casablanca to pair it with.  That plus it also had the same director of "His Girl Friday" made me want to watch it again.  I didn't care much for it.