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Snakes In The Ball Pit => How I choose to spend my time => TeeVee => Topic started by: Lemon on March 11, 2013, 10:47:37 am

Title: Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread
Post by: Lemon on March 11, 2013, 10:47:37 am
So Charlie Brooker (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Brooker) is responsible for quite a bit of television, because rather than producing a regularly scheduled BBC program where a guy yells at a television, why not create many different versions of that exact program? Five in a row and then a clip show afterwards!

Anyway, of note recently it's

Watch both things.
Title: Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread
Post by: Lemon on March 11, 2013, 10:48:37 am
Oh, and related: Has The Internet written any Barry Shitpeas/Philomena Cunk erotic fiction yet? That could either be very funny or very depressing.
Title: Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread
Post by: Lemon on March 11, 2013, 01:12:13 pm
Also, after making this post, I found this interview.


It is, of course, an interview with an entertainer (probably in front of a room of "aspiring" entertainers) and therefore kind of bootlicking in nature. Still pretty good though. What makes it better is that they didn't have time at the end for Q&A, so you don't have to sit through "Hi, my name's Tristan and I'm a third year student of screenwriting and directing. What do you feel is the essence of art?"
Title: Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread
Post by: Moriarty on March 11, 2013, 10:37:27 pm
I love the look on the interviewer's face when she's asking about the pig-fucking. And the way she just kind of keeps going "but did it really, really have to be pig-fucking?"

It also always amuses me when writers/comedians/etc talk about how they just kind of wandered into what they do, since that's pretty much how I ended up writing for a living myself. It makes me wonder what percentage of writers seriously had any inkling that they would be becoming writers more than five minutes before it happened.
Title: Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread
Post by: fluffy on March 17, 2013, 03:13:33 am
I loved Black Mirror and I didn't know there was a second series. Thanks!
Title: Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread
Post by: Delcat on March 19, 2013, 01:40:50 am
Weekly Wipe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weekly_Wipe)
Lemon, March 11, 2013, 10:47:37 am

Oh God, I went a dark, dark place there before reading the description.
Title: Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread
Post by: John Toast on March 20, 2013, 01:27:19 am
I love the Wipe he did on American television, both for his comprehensive commentary on US TV and for when he showed British TV to Americans. Watching a bunch of Americans react to Countdown is delightful. (Countdown is a British game show with cartoonishly low production values.)

He also did a section where he created his own reality TV show episode (or something to that effect) and it's brilliant. I mean I always knew reality TV was full of shit, but it's interesting to watch how the shit is made. That came out badly. Moving on.

I still need to watch Black Mirror. It sounds like the kind of thing you'd see if you plugged a TV cable into Stog's head.
Title: Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread
Post by: fluffy on March 20, 2013, 03:55:48 pm
I still haven't gotten around to watching series 2, but series 1 is great.  Episode 1 is basically an extrapolation of 4chan, 2 is an extrapolation of "gamification" and microtransaction nonsense, and 3 seemed kind of silly and unrealistic in a "why the hell would that be an issue" (even as an obvious metaphor for Facebook etc.) but the conversations that have erupted around Google Glass make it a lot more obviously brilliant than I originally gave it credit for.
Title: Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread
Post by: fluffy on March 23, 2013, 12:39:38 am
S2E1 was amazing, especially in light of this piece of creepiness (http://liveson.org/).
Title: Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread
Post by: transatlanticalien on April 15, 2013, 11:17:32 pm
I've read TV Go Home and Screen Burn (a collection of his television reviews for the Guardian(?)) multiple times and I loved Screenwipe. Nathan Barley (a collaborative effort with Chris Morris) is also great
Title: Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread
Post by: chai tea latte on October 22, 2013, 01:33:11 am
Just finished rewatching Black Mirror.

If you haven't sen it yet you really should.
Title: Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread
Post by: cyclopeantrash on October 23, 2013, 05:11:20 pm
Lemon, March 11, 2013, 01:12:13 pm

Is it just me, or does Charlie look like a larval David Lynch in this interview?
Title: Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread
Post by: fluffy on October 23, 2013, 06:35:18 pm
Is it just me, or does Charlie look like a larval David Lynch in his body of work?
MicroMonster, October 23, 2013, 05:11:20 pm
FTFY
Title: Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread
Post by: Lemon on December 04, 2013, 01:16:34 am
This has really been the first Charlie Brooker thing that I really thought was crap.


An arbitrary list of video game things because people who like video games tend to like it when people on television mention video games. The whole thing is presented in an "I Love The 90's" way with a lot of beyond-pointless interviews with famousish people saying "Oh yes, Space Invaders certainly was popular when it came out." Really idiotic and I turned it off, realized I had nothing else to watch, and then finished the thing because I was too lazy to go upstairs and work on other things.

Anyway, there's a piece at the end where this guy's saying that he has a child on the autism spectrum, and that he has his son play Minecraft and his son really loves Minecraft. And that's been helpful in his development because then he can play Minecraft and then probably play Minecraft some more.

Which really seems akin to "Hey alcoholic! You know a thing or two about booze, could you run my liquor store for me?"
Title: Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread
Post by: Odd on December 09, 2013, 07:30:31 pm
This has really been the first Charlie Brooker thing that I really thought was crap.
Lemon, December 04, 2013, 01:16:34 am

Charlie Brooker can write really funny sour comments but the format of his shows lends itself to filler.
I would really enjoy his Videogame programs if he commented more on game plots and storytelling and a whole lot less about how socially relevant or innovative a game is. Maybe a funny deconstruction on how lots of modern cinematic videogames try to inspire sadness, melancholy, paternal feelings, etc.

On the broad scheme of things I don't care what videogame came up with what idea first.
Title: Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread
Post by: fluffy on December 09, 2013, 09:20:39 pm
So basically Feminist Frequency but about tropes in general, not just the subtly misogynistic ones? I'd be all over that.
Title: Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread
Post by: Odd on December 09, 2013, 11:21:55 pm
So basically Feminist Frequency but about tropes in general, not just the subtly misogynistic ones? I'd be all over that.
fluffy, December 09, 2013, 09:20:39 pm

It should also, ideally, not be boring. That may not have been clear.
Title: Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread
Post by: Lemon on January 05, 2015, 09:54:59 pm
I wrote this (http://thefpl.us/wrote/black-mirror-spoilers)

It is very long.

I think it is funny.
Title: Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread
Post by: Odd on January 05, 2015, 11:40:09 pm
I kept whispering to myself "That's an episode of The Twilight Zone" as I read your review and I was quite happy to see you also picked up on that.

That plot fits my bias that bitter comedians are actually not very good at the whole hypothetical sociology scenario game. That there are certain people that are quite good at criticizing stuff in a humorous tone but have completely fucked up ideas about how things should be or will be by their rules. Then again, almost nobody is good at that hypothetical sociology scenario game, but one would think that bitter comedians would know they suck at it.
Maybe a factor for all the flaws in this setting is that Brits are used to a very restrictive legal system. 
Title: Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread
Post by: EYE OF ZA on March 03, 2016, 10:28:32 pm
I just binge-watched Black Mirror based on remembering that Lemon wrote a post about it once that I didn't understand.  Now I've got opinions about the episodes.

S1E1 is a really good opener, because it leaves you kind of wondering what sort of show this is going to be until they finally say 'the demands are for you to fuck a pig on live TV'.  And then after that, I kept wondering if it was going to swerve away and solve the problem, or if it was going to go more humorous with it, but it didn't. It's probably my favorite, because it's got the thriller-esque political realism aesthetic, but where your Toms Clancy or Clives Cussler would have a solution, in this, there just isn't one.  I don't know if I was just paying poor attention or what though, but even after seeing the carpenter guy hanging himself at the end, I didn't put together that he was the artist they were talking about.  I had to get that from Wikipedia.

S1E2 is also really good, but it takes a really different tact and goes full-on dystopia.  But it felt a bit like it lingered a bit too much on the details, especially during the beginning.  It was like they weren't sure if they were going for cinema pacing or short film pacing, and spent the first half establishing and re-establishing the world.  The ending also left me wondering--does he not care about her any more?  Has he given up on getting her out?  The plot also sort of hinges on magic mind control juice, which seems a little silly given how relatively grounded the other episodes are.  It feels like they focused on the emotional journey more than the tight plot of the first.

S1E3 is set in a world where everyone can record memories onto an implant behind their ear, and is about a couple having a fight about her old relationships.  It's good, but I have trouble sympathizing with rich, successful people who have parties with all their friends and who are self-confident enough to show off their own memories.  And stories about cheating.  So, whatever, it's not quite for me.  The way it builds is interesting, because I thought it was going in a much more dystopian direction with the interview at first, but then it just focused in on their relationship and kept magnifying the problem.  And speaking of magnifying, it uses the CSI-style zoom/enhance more than I would expect a show this generally smart about technology to do so.  (It still represented the future tech well, though.)  It was my least favorite of the first season, but still good on its own.  The best parts to me were the little hints of the greater culture surrounding this technology: airport security replaying your last week, reviewing your baby's memories of the babysitter, being able to sue your parents for negligence based on your recorded memories, et cetera.

S2E1, about the grieving girl who gets the simulate-your-deceased-loved-one service, is really good, especially knowing that it exists in real life.  I wondered whether the real service came out before or after he wrote this?  At any rate, I liked the intensity of the emotions and the way that it's both about grief, but also about virtual intelligence.  Just aesthetically, I liked the pairing of the high-tech stuff like her drawing tablet and the old-fashioned cottage.  The jump to 'oh, yeah, we've got special artificial humans that never need to eat' seemed like a weird move from the close-future technology level of the rest of the stuff.  Thinking about it now, I still don't know if her mom knows by the end what's going on with her keeping him in his attic.  Is she okay with it?  Does she know?  Is her daughter going to spill the beans on accident?

S2E2, about a woman waking up with no memories in a town where everyone's watching her with their phones, was an interesting journey.  It started out pretty haunting, but as it went on, I got confused, because again, this one seemed to be doing magic tech mind control nonsense and horror movie cliches, and it was coming to its climax like fifteen minutes before the end.  But then the turn came, and...does it make something that's not super good better that it was bad on purpose?  I really like the concept of it, but it's two-thirds of a dumber story plus one-third of a much smarter story.  It still seemed at the end a bit like, is everyone still so excited about torturing this murderer from so long ago?  Is she a special instance, or do all sensational murderers get the starring-in-their-own-horror-movie torture?  In the end, it's one of the neatest ideas, but kind of loses momentum after the reveal when she's just getting paraded around while sobbing.

S2E3, about the satirical cartoon character getting onto the ballot as an election candidate, was the weakest of the second season for me, even though I liked it.  The one issue I had with it is that even at my most nihilist late-teen everything-is-bullshit self, I wouldn't support an actual cartoon.  I get that's the conceit, but they don't really do enough to sell the fact that people like him.  All the characters in the episode talk about how he's a nothing of a candidate, and he doesn't have enough of any sort of presence to seem like something people would actually follow on strength of character alone.  The campaign relationship between the bear's actor and the Labor candidate hinges on a romcom-level miscommunication.  I liked the American who was just from "the agency" talking about using the character worldwide, but the payoff for that in the end seemed like it was too over-the-top with its future society entirely based around bear worship.  It would have been better ended, I think, with just seeing the bear used by some (presumably America-backed) dictatorial regime or something, instead of going the full sci-fi with it.

The White Christmas episode is eminently watchable because it has Jon Hamm making Christmas breakfast for you in it, but the troubles with it are a) it feels like three rejected ideas for episodes from the first two seasons; b) the three episodes don't function all that well wrapped into one narrative; and c) these episodes were rejected for a reason.  The PUA part was a worse version of Amateur Night, the first segment from the horror-anthology V/H/S; the egg part was really just there to establish a reason for some bullshit in the frame narrative; and the blocking thing combines the romcom miscommunication with the Rich Handsome People Cheating plot and ends with non sequitur murder.

Here's to the new series, courtesy of Netflix!
Title: Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread
Post by: Digital Walnut on May 21, 2016, 02:26:55 pm
It looks like Weekly Wipe is on an indefinite hiatus, but they gave Diane Morgan (Philomena Cunk) her own show with Brooker on as a writer. I enjoyed it.
Cunk on Shakespeare (http://www.standard.co.uk/stayingin/tvfilm/cunk-on-shakespeare-14-hilarious-pearls-of-wisdom-from-philomena-cunk-about-hamlet-macbeth-and-gary-a3245831.html)
Title: Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread
Post by: chai tea latte on May 21, 2016, 07:55:02 pm
It looks like Weekly Wipe is on an indefinite hiatus, but they gave Diane Morgan (Philomena Cunk) her own show with Brooker on as a writer. I enjoyed it.
Cunk on Shakespeare (http://www.standard.co.uk/stayingin/tvfilm/cunk-on-shakespeare-14-hilarious-pearls-of-wisdom-from-philomena-cunk-about-hamlet-macbeth-and-gary-a3245831.html)
Digital Walnut, May 21, 2016, 02:26:55 pm
Philomena Cunk was the best part of Wipe anyway. Fantastic news. Her Web series on YouTube is also great.

Title: Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread
Post by: CormansInferno on October 07, 2016, 05:24:58 pm
Black Mirror is back in 2 weeks.
Apparently the Netflix order is going to be split into 2 seasons, since it was for 12 episodes.
Title: Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread
Post by: Lemon on October 23, 2016, 11:00:21 pm
It took until the 2nd episode of the 3rd series for a character to say "Would you kindly" into an earpiece.
Title: Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread
Post by: chai tea latte on October 24, 2016, 01:19:23 am
Fuuuuuuuuck

fuuuuuuuuck, these are soul-crushing
Title: Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread
Post by: Lemon on October 27, 2016, 08:53:02 pm
Episode 3 (Shut Up And Dance):

This one was the first time this series where I was actually on board with an episode. The first one with the rating system was a fun sci-fi premise but then the actual story it told felt really rote and bland, and it never did anything that you couldn't have explained in the first five minutes. Ep 2 had nothing for me, but then the third one I was pretty quickly into.  I loved the idea of a kid being blackmailed for the crime of masturbating, and I thought they handled that in a way that made a whole lot of sense. The tech wasn't terribly far out (except for the part about some anonymous stranger being able to track you meter for meter because you turned location services on, but that's fine) and it was building to an ending I was really interested in seeing.

And then, the ending actually happened.

If you wanna pull out a Lulsec ending to your story and not make it seem like a cop out, it needs to actually make some sense in 4chan terms. The people chosen were far too few, far too random, and had no common bond or central point to crusade against. Just random fuckers, all scooped up from entirely different means and then made to suffer because LOL SUFFRING, and that was fucking stupid. Also, if you're going to engage in a criminal conspiracy, it's never a great idea to call the police on all the people you blackmailed. Also the attempt at making the driver a sympathetic character by using the "give me my kid back" cheat code doesn't work. You bullied a child into committing armed robbery even though you knew it would ruin his life. You could have mitigated that a bit, but you didn't. Don't try to explain your actions afterwards. And especially don't try to hint that our main character did something more sinister at his computer at the end, because that's not a twist, that's intentionally ruining the one good idea you had.


Anyway, I Have Opinions.
Title: Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread
Post by: Baldr on October 28, 2016, 05:15:56 pm
I loved Fifteen Million Merits.  I think about it all the time.  The other six episodes were horrible to watch, but they didn't stay with me in the way that particular episode did.  I think the difference is that I couldn't see the other episodes becoming a reality, but it felt like Fifteen Million Merits was already here.  Some science fiction author once said that the great works of science fiction weren't the ones that prophesied the future, they were the ones that made everyone step back and stop it from happening.  For example, today I was at a meeting where someone used the word 'badgification' unironically.  And I had this visceral reaction while I briefly remembered Fifteen Million Merits.  And then I thought, "I need to get off of this committee immediately." 

So would those of you who are doing the new season to yourselves be willing to report back and let us know if there's anything in Brooker's new stuff as good as the second episode of the first season?
Title: Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread
Post by: Kreega on October 30, 2016, 10:50:21 am
Yeah I haven't been liking the new series all that much. I wonder what made them shift from satire into just stories about technology? It's really sidestepping what I liked about this show. Episode 1 was the closest (I've only watched up to 3, mind), it's definitely the one I enjoyed the most, but didn't live up to even the lowest points of the previous series.

In 2 I just kept waiting for the story to have some kind of point, which never arrived. The "twist" at the end of 3 amounted to nothing at all. Like they did an episode on the British paedophile witch hunt with White Bear, to amazing effect. This episode seemed to have absolutely nothing to say, even if that weren't the case.
I guess I'll go check if it picks back up, but I'm really disappointed with how this series has turned out.
Title: Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread
Post by: EYE OF ZA on November 17, 2016, 04:41:02 pm
I had that same experience of waiting for the point in the first episode of the new series.  It's about a system where people can rate other people, and from the moment I say that, you know the plot.  I kept waiting for some sort of turn, but it never came.  Two characters said the point of the story out loud.

What I did like, even though it had no bearing on the story, was the endless suburban/freeway sprawl.  This is a bit of a Shitty Internet Nerd opinion and I'm worried that if I say it I'll turn into a Tardis or something, but it was kind of the most UK thing in the story.  False enthusiasm is such a stereotypically American trait, it makes me wonder if the original Charlie Brooker story-slash-outline (credits say story, Wikipedia says three-page outline) had that or if it was more of a false politeness thing.
Title: Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread
Post by: EYE OF ZA on November 17, 2016, 10:31:03 pm
Just watched the second episode of series three, and while it wasn't really satirical, it did 'feel' a lot more like previous Black Mirror episodes to me.  People were a bit smarter and no one stopped to say the moral of the story, though I'm not sure there is one.  It's got the irony side of the "ironic satire" thing the first two series nailed.
Title: Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread
Post by: chai tea latte on November 17, 2016, 11:49:45 pm
Episode 4 is the best this season, imo.
Title: Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread
Post by: EYE OF ZA on December 31, 2017, 03:56:12 am
Just got caught up on the back half of season three. Episode four was definitely pretty up there, especially once it got around to the ending, but there was a point where I sat back and made little mouths with my hands and went "exposition exposition". Oh well, still really good.

Five was also pretty good, though the best part of it for me was listening to the way people talked about the roaches, because it hit that right blend of appealing to morality while being utterly disgusting.

Six I was kind of bummed out about, because at the start it seemed like it might be a very low-tech episode, and I kind of prefer those. Not that the more speculative ones haven't also been good, but my favorite out of all of them remains the first season's first episode, and that one takes basically zero bullshit technology.  And then a ton of people are just...kinda stupid. Like, okay, the bees are coming after the politician guy. Why can't he just get on a plane and outrun them? Or, even better, go somewhere where the bees aren't. This is just the UK, so why not...fly to France? Or fucking New Zealand if you want to really get away.

And then Twitter (they try not to say it, but they call it "tweets" so it's Twitter) is just fine with letting this continue to happen instead of blocking the hashtag? I know they let shithole nazis post on there but I think if you phoned them up like "this hashtag is literally going to kill people" they would shut that shit (or at least that specific hashtag) down. And how are the bees accessing tweets anyway? Couldn't Twitter block them, or cram garbage data into the system?

Also why did the fucking idiot cop post a tweet to his account with his public identity using information that was only obtained through evidence? Jesus christ dude.
Title: Charlie Brooker Catch-All Thread
Post by: Muffinator on January 01, 2018, 01:24:23 am
Black Mirror season 4 is really good but somebody needs to sit Charlie down and tell him that it's sometimes okay to not have a twist ending.

Like damn, episode 4 was really good but that ending added nothing. It was there to make you go "whoa I didn't expect that" but it just ended up cheapening what could've been an incredible piece of TV.