Just watched Scent of a Woman again, which I think is easily one of the most quotable films ever- “Don’t shrug, imbecile. I’m blind. Save your body language for the bimbi. “
Think I am going to watch this new Netflix show with Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright.
You?
Misha
Watching the final season of The United States of Tara and contemplating the end of 30 Rock. That new Netflix show looks damned interesting—it’s in the queue.
Mustang Bobby
Got Bill Maher and Real Time going.
Lee Hartmann
See the original with Ian Richardson on the BBC. most cynical and enjoyable political satire I’ve seen.
lamh35
watching he original Halloween movie from the 70s. I’m jut wondering how the hell Michael Myers ever killed anybody! this mofo was slow as shhhh!!
Also, I kunda aint mad at the neighbor in the original movie who heard Jamie Lee Curtis knocking as Michael Myers was running, sorry, “power walking” after her and just closed the blinds and turned out the light
burnspbesq
It’s time to pop open the Inspector Lewis DVDs I got for Christmas.
TheMightyTrowel
Listening to Triple J and cleaning the house/brainstorming a YA sci fi novel.
Raven
Just watched House of Cards. I’ll be interested to see what you think. Not crazy about the talking to the camera bit. And the opening segment. . . .
Brendanyc
House of C is pretty interesting, though the first episode is a lot of obvious set up (as usually happens). Wright is scarier than Spacey! she is really good. he is too, of course. we’ll have to wait to see if the rest measure up to them.
TaMara (BHF)
@JohnCole top: I await your review. So far all the critics I like have loved it. I’ll have time later in the month and I’ll definitely watch.
Tonight it’s sleep. I’ve been seeing an acupuncturist once a week for the last few weeks and I’m just wiped for a day or two after each visit.
Raven
@Brendanyc: And the tomato just knew she could walk in the Kennedy Center and he’d look at her ass for the camera. Right.
Alison
I’ve never seen Scent of a Woman, but as for uber-quotable Pacino movies, Heat is way up there for me. YOU COULD GET KILLED WALKING YOUR DOGGIE!
skippy
i am peeved that house of cards is not available on disc yet, as that is how i netflix. currently i am alternating between discs of dexter season 6, sons of anarchy season 4, 24 season 7, and wrapping up the big c season 2.
meanwhile, may i remind everyone that this weekend is the annual al weisel/jon swift blogroll amnesty day, wherein we encourage every blog in blogtopia (and yes, i coined that phrase) to link to 5 blogs with less traffic than their own, to give smaller voices a larger audience.
The Dangerman
House of Cards has the lovely Kate Mara; given it’s a football weekend, I think watching a Mara seems apropos.
Anyone watch Netflix’s Lillyhammer? It’s supposed to be quite good.
Tod Westlake
If you’re going to watch the remake, you have to watch the original with Ian Richardson. Absolutely wonderful. Available on Netflix Instant.
Brendanyc
@Raven: yes, i think that’s an example of the first episode obvious set up/exposition that they will have to get past asap. clunky. but i love the main couple!
Raven
@The Dangerman: Oh, she’s the tomato.
James E. Powell
I have to do grades this weekend, so I’m struggling to find something to do instead. The netflix search for something, anything isn’t ringing any bells, so I am probably going to be standing in front of a redbox in a couple of hours, pissing off the people behind me.
Raven
@Brendanyc: What about the talking to the camera? I think I’m just too much into real shit for that to work for me. Jack Benny it ain’t.
Raven
@James E. Powell: Shameless, the UK series.
freelancer
I’m halfway through Episode 9 of House of Cards. No Spoilers. I like this show. Spacey is great, he’s having so much fun in this role, you can’t take your eyes off of him.
Lots of good talent in this show. Michael Kelly, Kate Mara. Robin Wright.
PeakVT
Has anyone read the last WoT book yet? I broke down and bought books 12 and 13 last week, and they weren’t great, but certainly better than the previous 3-4 books.
300baud
Netflix suggested I check out Life. I’m really fond of it. Definitely the best zen detective show ever. And then there may be some Archer and Justified on the menu as well.
yam
Bad code migration last night looking like it’s gonna ruin my weekend. Still at work. Stupid programmers.
Listening Cheezy Lounge Music and trying to make the best of it.
Alison
BTW I can’t for the life of me remember who it was, but thank you to whichever one of you suggested the cookbook for my brother’s birthday gift. He loved it! His birthday was last Tuesday and on Wednesday he’d already started marking off recipes for the weekend. :) Yay, online communities.
General Stuck
Netflix has become a herd of Zebras for me. There are so many choices, all I see are endless stripes. And I can’t decide on just one long enough to watch anything all the way through. I may have to get back into therapy to sort this out. It could just be my Quaalude deficiency acting up again.
gogol's wife
@burnspbesq:
I just watched part two of Deceived by Flight (Inspector Morse, 1989) for the thousandth time and enjoyed it thoroughly. Lewis plays cricket!
Valdivia
If you haven’t seen the BBC original you really should. It’s delicious.
dmsilev
Did you see that the NRA’s official enemy list was publicized today, and included such figures as Mary Lou Retton and the National Spinal Cord Injury Association.
I say bravo to the NRA; it’s about time that someone stands up, so to speak, to the nefarious forces of Big Quadriplegia.
(I’m going to Hell, aren’t I?)
Groucho48
Just found out the first two seasons of Downton Abbey are free for Prime members on Amazon. Halfway through the first season now. It’s as fun as everyone has claimed it is.
Johannes
I love the Ian Richardson original. but will give the Spacey a try. After all, as FU says to us at the beginning of the original, “Nothing lasts forever. Even the longest, the most glittering, reign, must come to an end…”
[cue trumpets!]
Alison
@PeakVT: Part of me kind of wants to get back into it now that it’s fiiiiiinally done, but…I only read up through I think book 8, and all those so long ago that I’d pretty much have to start over. And I just have so many other books to read…and yeah, the series started kind of sucking which is why I’d stopped. So…not sure.
Yutsano
@James E. Powell: I’m on a total Buck Rogers kick on Netflix right now. The funny thing is I remember this being a total cheesefest as a kid (the babealiciousness didn’t do anything for me, gee that MIGHT have been a sign) but I’m watching it now and it’s really not that bad. Yeah it’s cheesy around the edges but the idea of a woman captain being in charge of the military must have just set conservatives on complete edge back in the day. But maybe they just didn’t case because it was sci-fi.
Suffern ACE
Someone else’s mild tragedy has resulted in free tickets to see a concert tomorrow night. Free is free, so I’ll spend the evening convincing myself that this is the one of the best bands I’ve never heard of.
MikeJ
The next person that says in-addr.arpa, I’m gonna kick ’em in the junk.
Fluke bucket
Reading Cat’s Cradle again.
dmsilev
@PeakVT: Gave up on Wheel of Time a long time ago. It had become the Xeno’s Paradox of fantasy series; in each book, the plot advanced only half as much as in the preceding volume. It just wasn’t worth the effort any more.
Yutsano
@Alison: You’re welcome. Michael Symon is really all kinds of awesome. Not too bad for a cheeseball from Cleveland!
NotMax
For movies containing an above average ratio of quotable dialogue (without getting into what would be a lengthy list), aside form the obvious Casablanca I’d include Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the original Star Wars.
Alison
@Yutsano: Ah, it was you? Well, thanks much, Yutsy! It was definitely a good fit for my brother. Some of the recipes might be a bit foodie-ish for him, but I bet most of them will work great.
PeakVT
@Alison: @dmsilev: I can’t blame you for giving up. Book 10 is especially awful. But for some reason I grabbed book 12 when I was at the bookstore a couple of weeks ago, and it was decent, so now I’m tempted to get the last one.
RoonieRoo
Grumpy Code Monkey and I are watching House of Cards right now. We just finished the original the other night and are enjoying both the similarities and the differences from the original.
Steeplejack (phone)
Waiting outside B&N to give former coworker a ride home. It is 20° now. Brr!
Mnemosyne
Picking the in-laws up at the airport on Sunday, so tomorrow the cleaning people are doing a deep clean on the apartment. Not that it will help much since we’re both still packrats.
Scamp Dog
Just got done teaching my evening physics lab. I will now head home, walk the dog, do a bit of housecleaning, and walk the dog again before bed. I like spoiling Miss Biscuit with walks. She likes them, and I need the exercise.
Tomorrow I will be studying OpenGL programming, and baking cinnamon biscuits, based on this recipe from Tamara, our food goddess. These will go to the Superbowl party I’m going to Sunday.
ranchandsyrup
Had a nice evening playing backgammon and drinking cheladas. Beach day tomorrow. Going to do some tide pooling and chuck the frisbees for the mutts.
Groucho48
@PeakVT:
With the caveat that any book that had SO many loose ends to tie up, characters stories to provide satisfactory finales to, and so on, the last book delivers. Very nicely done.
With some of the loose ends, you can tell Sanderson was just going down a check list and providing the shortest, neatest solution he could come up with, but, mostly, the book concludes them organically.
And, for readers that stopped before Sanderson took over, he writes in a much tighter way than Jordan. No endless descriptions of what every character is wearing. No throwing the names of dozens of Aes Sedai at you without the least hint of just who they are, because you were supposed to remember their two paragraph appearance two books ago.
There were some decisions I’d quibble with, but, all-in-all, highly recommended.
Steeplejack
I lost my plum parking spot on the street in front of my apartment, so when I came home I had to park in the lot behind a building down the street and walk 100 yards in the freezing cold. It was just like Napoleon’s retreat from Russia!
/hoekstroika
Walker
@PeakVT:
Finished when it came out. Not perfect, but quite good. The best ending we could have reasonably hoped for. Several powerful scenes on par with what we got in the early books.
Indeed, my only complaint with the book is the Padan Fain resolution.
Higgs Boson's Mate
I’ll watch anything with Kevin Spacey in it at least once. Fingers crossed.
On another note; a quick read through of the comments suggests that most of us are watching series that originated on the Beeb, HBO, etc. Can network television survive without the all-important BJ demo?
EDIT: I get all of my television and movies through Netflix and Amazon Prime so I’m biased.
Walker
@PeakVT:
The 11th book (Knife of Dreams, last book written by Jordan) has some of the best Mat chapters in the entire series. If it were not for the horrible Elayne chapters in that book, it would have been one of the top books in the series.
wasabi gasp
Smoking fatties and rocking out. No cocks out.
Novi Singers – Torpedo
karl
We all know how good the original House of Cards is (and I’ll definitely watch the new one) but has anyone else seen the original Scent of a Woman with Vittorio Gassman? I saw it almost forty years ago, liked it (don’t know if it holds up), and found the remake unwatchable.
No quotable lines, though, it’s in Italian.
PeakVT
@Groucho48: Thanks.
@Walker: Thanks. Mat is the main reason I stuck with the series. He’s ridiculous, but I still like the character.
hamletta
OMG House of Cards!! My mom taped the middle bit (“To Play the King”) for me when it ran on Masterpiece Theatre. (She did a bunch of that back then, because she was horrified my local PBS affiliate refused to run Tales Of the City. They got bettah.)
I wore that tape out, and then years later, I found out it was a trilogy: There was more! When John Roberts fanboyed out because the whole series was on Netflix Instant, I flirted with subscribing right that minute, because OMG House of Cards!
When I heard about the remake, I was pleased with Kevin Spacey in the FU role. I guess I better subscribe to Netflix.
Steeplejack
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
I’m watching some network series. Grimm and Person of Interest both started out a little shaky and then really picked up steam. Elementary is still in the “starting shaky” zone but is showing signs of life. It seems to get a lot of hate because of Lucy Liu and the fact that it is a ripoff of the British Sherlock. But Jonny Lee Miller is very good, and the writing has improved recently.
On the other hand, The Following is definitely starting shaky and not looking good.
Groucho48
@PeakVT:
Mat is one of my favorite characters as well. He gets his innings in the last book, but, the Sanderson Mat doesn’t sparkle quite as much as the Jordan Mat.
Radio One
there isn’t any question that the BBC version of House of Cards was hugely influential for the Sopranos, Breaking Bad, the Wire, Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire, Fringe, or any other TV show that relies on protagonists who tend to be villains with justification.
Linnaeus
Just finished watching The Prince of Tides. That was a good movie.
hamletta
@Radio One: Yeah, because everybody hated to watch Basil Rathbone, Claude Rains, and George Sanders being lusciously evil.
You must be young.
Seanly
@PeakVT:
That’s series is still going? I gave up after no. 6 or 7. Each book was 500 pages of descriptions of the simple woolen gowns worn by the 35 witches intermixed with 500 pages of the plot never advancing.
Anne Laurie
@Linnaeus: Prince of Tides was a damn fine book, for those of us who are connosieurs of dysfunction. Starts with the main character’s mother calling him up to inform him that everybody in town knows his wife is cheating on him, and they’re glad, because heaven knows the poor woman deserves better.
After which, it gets ugly…
slightly_peeved
@Seanly:
It appears that he & Brandon realised this, and crammed all the plot into the last 3 books. This makes them a lot more readable than the several before.
donnah
Another fan of Downton Abbey, and I was peeved to find that after devouring the entire first season on Netflix that they took away the second season. I don’t know how long I can wait for them to put it back. I may have to buy it. I love the show.
My teenage son and I enjoy watching BBC America shows and we’ve watched Sherlock, Luther, all of the new Dr Who, and then old series like the West Wing, which I’m enjoying maybe more than when I saw it the first time. My son’s watched Walking Dead, but I didn’t like the crunching sounds of zombies munching on people, so I quit that.
I am losing hope in Dexter, as he’s killed his way into a corner and I think the show has gotten too convoluted. I’m waiting to see the resolution of the cliffhanger on Psyche, too.
It sounds like I watch too much TV…
maurinsky
I thought Scent of a Woman was hilariously awful and notably unquotable, but chacoun a son gout.
I’m watching season 3 of Downton Abbey, The Unusuals on Netflix, and we’re going to have a mini-Dudefest this coming week.
Maude
@maurinsky:
I didn’t like the movie. It was overdone and too long.
maurinsky
@Maude: When I saw it with a couple of friends at the movie theater, we all burst out laughing at what was supposed to be the dramatic high point of the movie – when Chris O’Donnell had the gun and squeaked out some kind of threat.
JGabriel
John Cole @ Top:
I’ve never seen Scent of a Woman, but I do remember some graffiti drawn on it’s poster in the NYC subway, circa 1993:
.
JGabriel
@Johannes: A
Po’ Ozzy Man Diaz.
.
Randy P
Kevin Spacey is an interesting actor who I love to watch. I managed to see him on stage in New York a few years ago in some otherwise-forgettable Irish play (yes, he did an Irish accent; I think he was the romantic lead). And just saw his first movie appearance a week or so ago when we streamed “Heartburn” (he played “Subway Thief”, and actually had a fairly substantial 30 seconds or so on screen, with lines and everything).
Pacino is also kind of interesting to watch, but I don’t always like him. I’ve been kind of curious about his Shylock though. One of these days I’m going to watch that 2004 “Merchant of Venice”.
Steeplejack
@donnah:
Saw a notice on Amazon this morning that Downtown Abbey is available on Amazon Prime and soon will be available “exclusively” on Amazon Prime.