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What TV SHOWS are you watching?
Let's make a nostalgic TV show, and set it in Crackertown, Indiana. We'll give the one notable black character a gag lifted from Keith David's "fourth ghostbuster" line in Community. Then we'll get in some chick from the Asian subcontinent and she can be a terrorist.
It's redolent with the same white nostalgia that Barnes claims is fueling the alt-right.
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The 80's nostalgia thing is slopped on a bit thick at times. Yeah, we get it. And sure, it's all kinds of derivative. But so what... It's still fun, and somehow feels fresh among all that's out there in TV land. There's a touch of arrogance to a second season like this, where all involved probably didn't think it would even happen, but then it became this huge hit... but there's also more confidence to it, and more money for SFX, so that's good.
I keep hearing about this big weird controversial episode 7. Thankfully not any more specifically than that. But whatever it is, if it is really a game-changer and shakes things up, that's probably a good thing at that point.
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- GorillaGrody
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JEM wrote: As serious as I care to get when discussing made up bullshit, yes.
Let's make a nostalgic TV show, and set it in Crackertown, Indiana. We'll give the one notable black character a gag lifted from Keith David's "fourth ghostbuster" line in Community. Then we'll get in some chick from the Asian subcontinent and she can be a terrorist.
It's redolent with the same white nostalgia that Barnes claims is fueling the alt-right.
Yeah, I found the first one fun, if a little slight. But having finished the latest iteration, and without giving any spoilers, I found this a boring slog, and sort of a delivery system for Proud Boys/alt right dog whistling. I mean, what in the hell do the Duffer Brothers even think a woman or a girlfriend or a mother even is, except some kind of a weird, blathering ideal? It's like they took all the female cast members aside at the start of filming and said "Okay, you're all girlfriends. You're going to be his girlfriend, you're going to be his girlfriend..." Why would the Max character even spend five minutes with these Trumpshirts (just kidding/not kidding) helping them navigate the mysteries of the pulsing pink tunnels and the sucking, unknowable triangle monster with legs that lives in the upside-down world?
It all just left a bad taste in my mouth. My wife hated it (and she loved the first one).
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EDIT: They both seem to like that Trump though, so I suppose the inclusion of both for the above example is fair.
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- GorillaGrody
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Basically, if you showed up to march for the right in Charlottesville, you're all of a piece, as far as I'm concerned.
Stranger Things 2 is not this, necessarily, but the gender thing really struck a note of "these women are trying to take everything away from us, what they want is scary, let's go back to something we can all understand." Just a note, but enough to turn us off from it.
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- Black Barney
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I think you're right about the women's role thing, and like I said in my edit before your post came in...they made sense in your example.
Either way, I'm not a member or apologist, but I do think it's entirely possible for someone to like the advancements of the west but not be a far right nazi...or even a general racist, sexist asshole. Hard to qualify that in these times though.
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- GorillaGrody
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Okay, but back to Stranger Things 2, and maybe my last post about it. I have forgiven many movies with "bad" politics because they were just fun or scary or well-made enough enough for me to forgive them. But the pacing of this show is just atrocious, like waiting for your turn at the dentist, but instead of fixing your teeth, the dentist sits you in a chair, shines that light in your face, and asks you whether you saw Aliens, and you say, yeah, everyone saw Aliens, and then the dentist says, okay, but did you see Firestarter? Like he's trying to stump you on a test for which everyone already got an A.
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Then there's the deeper deconstructive readings like Gorilla's where the imagery underlying the horrors is pretty comically transparent.
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- Michael Barnes
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I finished the show, I loved it. The ending was lovely.
- The dance was awesome. I loved that it was presented as a transition point for the boys- next season...girls!
- Steve has emerged as one of the best characters.
- Apparently that was actually Millie Bobby Brown's first kiss IRL.
- I hate that Bob saved everybody with his knowledge of BASIC and then died stupidly. The AV Club reveal was nice though.
- Billy may be something of a misfire. I think they are not sure what they want to do with him or how they want him to develop. We'll see.
- The entire Mind Flayer discussion was awesome.
- I did not like the conspiracy theory dude. I met way too many of him when I worked in the public library.
- Everybody going to the lab at the end was fun
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- hotseatgames
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- Jackwraith
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I thought the BASIC thing was fairly simple-minded in the way that almost all interactions with actual computers are in movies and TV. Most government networks were running COBOL or Fortran by that time and even a knowledge of the language doesn't mean that you'd know the protocols to reboot an entire network. It's almost as wholly unrealistic as a gate to the Upside Down.
Am I the only one who thinks that Billy looks like a young and somewhat beefier Rob Lowe? In terms of his character, I guess I can see the concept that Maxine basically treated him the same way that his dad does and he cowered in the face of determined authority. But he was also drugged at the time, so it doesn't feel as distinct as it might have if she had made him submit when he was sober. I think that whole storyline remained way too much of a mystery until we finally meet their parents and then it had nothing to do with the main story that was building to a crescendo, so it felt kind of irrelevant. However, just like the Chicago scene, it lays groundwork for next season.
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GorillaGrody wrote: No, I didn't read you as an apologist. We're okay, I think. Unless, of course, you don't think there's a relative value to different cultures, or a value to knowing how more than one of them operates at a level for which "best" isn't really meaningful.
To be honest...I'm not really sure how to respond to this. There's a lot of fight in your posts. I just clarified some statements, not sure why there's an attempt to paint me as an online enemy to tilt at.
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- Black Barney
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what pride thing?
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