Video (TV show)

Tonality

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This show was not completely successful, but I love this scene at least partially because it and the show itself feels really tonally different from all the other shows recently which seem so monotonous and ultra-pasteurized.

And here’s the same clip by someone who didn’t understand the “terrible” dialogue was intentional; this is two people interacting who are socially inept, stunted, having had very few normal interactions and both living in repressed, horrible societies. The woman is the extrovert side of that and the guy is the introvert. They have zero social skills and very little experience with anyone different from them. That’s the whole point of the scene — that is, them learning how to interact despite their chasm of inexperience and social cluelessness.

It’s fascinating how many people can watch something and just not understand it at all. Like, not in the least.

Summer’s Glau

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Such a great, insanely well-written show. What I like about it in particular (and this scene) is that even though everyone knows what “she” is, her looking like that still allows her to partake of the halo effect of young female beauty, but also be constrained by it as well in certain situations — that is, even being a “very scary robot” still doesn’t allow her unrestrained freedom.

Again, so well-written — e.g. the part where she turns his phrase around on him and says, “He’s not a guy, he’s a ‘scary robot.'” It helps to know the backstory of the show and Cameron’s (the female terminator) as well, but it’s clear that she is resentful of his by-proxy characterization of her. That’s why she turns his phrase back around on him like that. But it’s all done with great subtlety. Each line matters, and each one reveals something more to the viewer without either character explaining anything in the emotional sense directly. Some shows would spend half an hour belaboring what the writers managed to do there in just a couple of taut minutes. And that is pretty impressive.

That show is just full of scenes I wish I could’ve written. (Sorry for the crap resolution.)

Drupes

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It doesn’t have really any direct effect on me, so it is kind of funny to marvel at how extremely prudish Gen Z is and how much they sound like the 70-year-old fundies I grew up listening to back in the 1980s and 1990s — just without the religious trappings (though they’ve managed to create a novel yet uninteresting religious apparatus themselves). In a way, it’s hard to wrap my head around as I keep expecting to hear God, Jesus and Satan et al. in their unhinged rants, but they manage to be complete prudes without any of that.

So many of them, as I’ve pointed out before, do sound exactly like Dana Carvey’s Church Lady character.

Stranger

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I know a million people have written about this scene, but that’s because it’s perfect. The composition, music, lighting, blocking, photography — it’s all just spot on. Stranger Things never lived up to its first season and only felt like the 1980s to those who didn’t live through that time, but Sadie Sink’s acting is just so wonderful here.

What I particularly love about is that even if you watch it a dozen times, it’s still suspenseful. It feels like you don’t know if she’ll get away. That is impressive. And if that is what depression feels like, I want no part of it.