Off Topic NETFLIX and Box Set series Thread.

yeah it is wierd but mainly a good watch. im sure someone on here said its a rip off of a japanese series.

 

i keep meaning to watch it. i like das boot (film) but there are so many versions. i think the german spoken version but not the real long one was my fave.

i liked sergeant york.....(embarrassed emoticon)

 

metal fatigue?

hahaha plum beat me to it.

 

Frank skinner on the south bank show is supposed to be really good
I’ll watch it later tonight

 

Not so much a rip off as old hat.

Obviously, there is the absolute classic, Battle Royale which was also ripped off by the Hunger Games. Good film.

Some years later (2014) there was As the Gods Will which had the red light, green light game.

More recently there has been Alice in Borderland in which people are "stolen" and forced to play games or die. I preferred this to Squid Game.

Having said that, Squid Game was decent, if massively over-hyped, only spightly spoiled by a ridiculous ending which lined up Season 2.

 

You should give it a go, the main character is incredible

 

Ms Marvel - belongs on kids tv.

Moonknight - really enjoyable and didn’t feel very “Marvel”. Some super acting in it.

Umbrellla Academy S3 - enjoyed first two series but this didn’t hold me. Kept easily switching off.

I’m finishing Ozark next (got the final season to do) and then final season of Peaky Blinders. Saved it all up for the holidays.

Debating going back into Better Call Saul considering how much I liked Breaking Bad. I couldn’t get into it the first time.

 

I went back to Better Call Saul just for this last series and it really does set up everything for Breaking Bad, each episode is a great story filmed brilliantly.

 

The cinematography really is great with Better Call Saul.

 

Try Yellowjackets.

 

Size?

 

One size fits all.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowjackets_(TV_series)

 

The timeline is all over the place in these last few episodes of Better Call Saul - not sure how it is going to tie together for the finale. This weeks offering seems like a break from the show, yet it tells us that Slippin Jimmy/Saul Goodman/Gene Takovic will never let the thrill of the conman leave his persona. So, what next? Is this series going to finish with a major ending for Saul Goodman merging into Breaking Bad or is the ending going to be about the fate of Gene Takovic in the post Breaking Bad era? It's a puzzler.

 

Same for me , it seemed very slow , watched it again and I really did appreciate it much more

 

I’m on episode 4 and I’m enjoying it more this time.

 

Our press are such ****s to people
Like a bit of gazza


Gary Numan: ‘I thought my comeback would take four years – not 41!’
Dave Simpson

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By the end of 1980, Gary Numan had a level of superstardom that, for working-class kids like him, had seemed as unachievable “as landing on the moon”. The singles Are “Friends” Electric? (with his band Tubeway Army) and Cars had both rocketed to No 1, as had the albums Replicas, The Pleasure Principle and Telekon. But he was unprepared for fame.

“There’s a glossy front-cover version where everything looks very glamorous,” he says, “but the reality can be damaging and destructive. Making music stops being this thing you love and starts to become about units and strategies. The stress and pressure of it all was unbelievably difficult, particularly for someone like me.”


Numan has since “learned how to be a famous person”, but at 23, with longstanding issues over social interactions, the constant interview requests, intrusion outside his house and snarky music press coverage (“with an unnecessary level of animosity”) were unbearable. Then he received death threats. “I felt like I was being pushed towards the edge of a cliff,” he says, flailing his arms as if to illustrate the feeling of losing balance. “And I didn’t want to fall off.”

So Numan walked away, announcing a “farewell” concert at Wembley Arena in 1981 (which was expanded to three nights owing to huge public demand) and retiring from live performance (for less than two years). “I wanted to get back to making music and to who I was before it all started,” he says. “The mistake was going public. I should have just quietly stopped touring and no one would have noticed. Instead, I upset everybody and destroyed my career.”

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‘I think the audience was even more emotional than I was’ … back at Wembley Arena in May. Photograph: Matt Frost/Sky UK
Today, the 64-year-old star is speaking by video from a house near Stirling in Scotland, which he bought as an investment after the pandemic exposed his reliance on live touring. The much-sampled electronic pop pioneer, who is politely spoken, friendly, open and occasionally endearingly self-deprecating, is in good form – and with reason. After years plugging away, his last two albums each entered at No 2 in the UK charts, and in May he even returned to Wembley, which had become a “symbolic target” for his recovery. “I thought it might take four years,” he laughs, “not 41.”

A new documentary, Gary NumanResurrection, tells the story of his rejuvenation with unusual candour, even showing the singer having a panic attack as the Wembley stage beckoned once again. “There was an earlier one which wasn’t filmed,” he reveals, “but about an hour before going on I was properly losing it. My dad was there, doing that typical bloke thing: ‘Come on, you’ll be all right.’ It was almost word for word what he told me when I was 18, playing in some little pub.”

But the moment Numan faced the audience, his anxiety melted away. “It was brilliant, actually,” he smiles. “The power of all those people making all that noise. Some of them had been at the first Wembley concerts, or stuck with me from the beginning. I think they were even more emotional than I was.”

Numan was born Gary Webb to a British Airways bus driver father and dressmaker mother and lived in Wraysbury in Berkshire, beneath the Heathrow flight path. His first ambition was to fly planes before a careers talk at Ashford grammar school in Surrey changed his mind. “The man said: ‘Only one in a thousand people get to be a pilot,’” he remembers. “Which is actually bullshit, terrible advice! But there were about 800 people in the school. I thought ‘There’s no way that’s going to be me.’ So I just said, ‘Right, I’ll be a pop star.’ It was childish thinking, but from that moment school became a pointless obstacle.” On top of becoming a pop star, he got his pilot’s license in 1980and founded the charter flight company Numanair.

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‘You accept you are inherently unlikable’ … Numan struggled with anxiety. Photograph: Matt Frost/Sky UK
The documentary reveals a letter from Numan’s headteacher branding him “the most disruptive pupil I’ve had in 21 years of teaching”. The singer was expelled twice – first from Ashford, then from Brooklands college in Weybridge. When he was 15, a child psychologist referred to Asperger syndrome, a then less well-known autism spectrum disorder. “She didn’t actually diagnose it, but she mentioned it,” he says. “It would have been viewed as a stigma then. My mum certainly took it that way and was quite upset about it.” Numan was put on anti-anxiety drugs Nardil and Valium for a year but it was never followed up and he continued having difficulties making or keeping friends.

In his first band, at school, he turned up at rehearsals one day to discover somebody else singing. “Then every single person in or around the band stopped talking to me or walked away,” he remembers. “I’d always tried to be friendly so I couldn’t understand it. Finally, one of their girlfriends said: ‘No one wants to know you any more.’ It was traumatic, but you accept that there’s something wrong with you, that you try to be friendly but are inherently unlikable, and so you become reclusive. Then you write songs about that.”

Adapting a name from one he found in the Yellow Pages (Neumann Kitchen Appliances) and very convincingly hiding his stage fright behind an image and persona, he poured his alienation and love of sci-fi into futuristic songs such as Cars (where “I feel safest of all. I can lock all my doors. It’s the only way to live”) and Me, I Disconnect from You. The singer had always been more fascinated by technology and noises than by conventional music, preferring the electric guitar bought by his steadfastly supportive parents to the acoustic “because it had dials and switches”. Numan was fronting Tubeway Army, with whom he made his first two albums, when he came across a Minimoog synthesiser: “A eureka moment. I thought, ‘That noise sounds brilliant. How can I get that into song?’”





He set about converting all his band’s guitar-based punk songs into electropop. Soon afterwards, the memorable synth hook for Are “Friends” Electric?, written on an old out-of-tune pub piano his parents bought, came about through “my bad playing. I hit a wrong note and it sounded better.” Just over a year after he signed to Beggars Banquet, the 1979 single sold a million copies.

By the 90s, though, his albums were being badly reviewed or not reviewed at all. “Which was even worse! In 1995, I did a single called Absolution which sold just 3,000 copies,” he reveals. “Less than my debut single when I was a complete unknown. That means 997,000 people had ****ed off!” Then, in the 00s, he was being mashed up by Sugababes and increasingly recognised as a key figure in electronic pop.

Numan’s resurrection started after he met Gemma O’Neill, a fan who connected with the singer after her mother died from cancer. They have now been together for 30 years and married for 25, and he credits her with helping him to view himself more positively and be more at ease in conversations. “Little nudges under the table, or long conversations after we’d been out somewhere,” he says. “‘Why did you say that? That’s why that person left.’ Socialising will always be stressful for me but I’m quite happy to hide in her shadow when we’re out. She has given me a confidence I never had before.”

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‘She has given me a confidence’ … Numan with wife Gemma O’Neill. Photograph: Sky UK/Gary Numan Resurrection
His wife also helped him recognise where his music had gone wrong. “I’d come to think of myself as the weak link in my albums,” he explains. “I was bringing in guitar players and other people to do the vocals. She said, ‘You may not be the best keyboard player or guitarist in the world, but you have a sound that people love.’ She was right.”

The couple have been through “very traumatic” IVF and lost a baby (they now have three teenage daughters), but their only serious period of turbulence was when both experienced depression. “She was coming out of hers just as I was going into mine,” he says. “I was thinking of … not getting divorced, but getting away for a while because everything felt negative.”

Instead, Numan wrote Lost, a beautiful song on Splinter (Songs from a Broken Mind), the 2013 album that returned him to the Top 20. “I fully intended to vent about how ****ty she was and how right I was,” he grins, “but all that came out was how brilliant she was. This might be dramatic, but I think it saved us.”

Numan admits that when 2017’s Savage (Songs from a Broken World) went in at No 2 in the UK album chart, followed by 2021’s Intruder, he “cried like a baby, because it meant so much”. His next “little hurdle” is another No 1, but some anxieties remain. He worries about global heating and the environment, and after the family relocated to Los Angeles in 2012, he worried about the rise of Donald Trump. Now, his biggest fear is that one day he won’t be here for his children, so he’s writing about “being dead, or coming back as a ghost and trying to communicate”.

“I don’t write happy songs,” he grins. “I write about what bothers me. I’d rather not be worried, but it’s all good. If I had stopped worrying I’d have only done one album.”

Gary Numan Resurrection is on Sky Arts and NOW on 13 August

 

Back in his early days his fan club was run by a teenage girl on OPE, she was a school mate of my ex sister in law; onetime when this girl had been into hospital for some minor operation he drove (quite a few miles apparently) to Hull and gave her parents flowers, a bag of 'stuff' and VIP tickets for four to give to their daughter - can't say I was a huge fan of his music but what he did was very thoughtful and shows him to be a decent guy.

 

Watched The Departed on Netflix. Had never even heard of this movie which apparently received accolades back in the day. My brain must be really slowing down as I found it difficult to keep up with all the connotations and back stabbings that were going on in it. I was getting confused as to who knew who as the movie continued. Jack Nicholson was excellent as always. One thought that struck me though: growing up watching Hollywood movies about American Italian mobster types, one got the impression that all Italian Americans were a ruthless conniving violent group located in low class areas of major cities. My then impressionable mind became conditioned to this stereotype. Nowadays, there seems to be a Hollywood film genre portraying Irish American mobsters in the same vein, like in this one or Black Mass etc. I have been very slow to realize how the entertainment industry can subtly condition the mind...just my interesting thought (for me at least) for today. It didn't take me as long (maybe by age 11!!!) to consider those old black & white Rank Corporation movies were probably bogus, the ones where a single Englishman in an impossibly perilous state would completely wipe out several hundred spear-brandishing savages with his trusty musket, except for the last savage who has to be stabbed due to the Colonel running out of bullets or the old westerns where Billy Bob would kill off an entire Indian warrior posse from the window of his farmstead using his Colt 45 except for the last Indian who has to be stabbed due to the homesteader running out of bullets.

 

I am watching Black Bird (Apple). Looks positive so far. A criminal is promised a quick release if he goes undercover to get a serial killer to admit his crimes and find were the bodies are buried.
Taron Egerton stars

 

I've enjoyed it. I'm actually 20mins into the last episode as I type