The Romanoffs

Started by wilder, April 19, 2017, 08:05:06 PM

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Drenk

Yes, they are, but apparently people don't like this one, too. I'd say: watch Episode 3 or 4.
Ascension.

BB

Finally caught up with all five. I'm digging it! Definitely getting stronger as it goes. Though I can totally see why this ain't making a splash. There's no real hook, y'know? No big sex, drugs, scandal, nothing. Okay, the whole Romanovs thing, but does anybody care about that? I like the show and I don't really. It hangs together like a good collection of short stories, employs the logic and vibe you might see in that context. How many people out there are reading good collections of short stories? Might prove to be one of those pleasant surprises that completists get for their efforts.

Quote from: Drenk on October 20, 2018, 09:30:05 AM
50 millions for a show that creates no digital wave at all is...a lot.

Yes, this is a bit troubling but I don't expect Weiner will have trouble getting his work out there. And his work is kinda surprisingly variegated. If anything, Mad Men is something of an outlier among his oeuvre. He's never done anything else quite so inspired and thematically rich and flawless. Not knocking the guy. You could do a lot worse than creating and show running one of the greatest television programs of all time.

Drenk

The sixth one was painful to watch. Does Weiner need to film something if he wants to spend some vacation time in Mexico? Or Paris? I don't think so. The best episodes are set in America.
Ascension.

Drenk

And:

The 7th episode is fantastic...

(Not written by Weiner.)
Ascension.

WorldForgot

Only seen up 'til Episode 3, but the concept has been bumping around my head. This show inhabits a near historical-fiction genre that ends up being more of a parallel-reality affect to our relationship with the Romanoffz, and the show'z with the Romanovz.

Are we all this displaced, psychically bound to archetypes? I think so. It's like catharsis for a cold war that never ended, and for an increasingly deluded global environment of ignorance that denies its obligation to history.

At least, that's how I'm feeling having just watched episode 3 last night, which was such a fun send-up of Meta Psychological Thrillers, but sent me into a Philip K Dick mindstate. Written by Mary Sweeney, it can remain a purely head-trip, yet the confidence of these characters in their environment (the re-telling of an oft-told tragedy) is all-together different beast from PKD or even Mulholland Dr. Sweeney, David Lynch's producer and follow cosmonaut, quickly gets across our relationship to filmmaking as a memory machine -- but here it's a toxic hostage situation, I read that more politically charged than the first two epz.

WorldForgot

Finished episode 5 and the show is deceptive, ie;

Quote from: BB on November 05, 2018, 09:22:35 PM
There's no real hook, y'know? No big sex, drugs, scandal, nothing. Okay, the whole Romanovs thing, but does anybody care about that? I like the show and I don't really.

The Romanovz are such a sideline tangent (as they are, sort of, to any of our lives) that the hook isn't them but them as scapegoats, as decor, as paradigm allegory etc. The big sex, drugs, scandal are there, but they're there in the interior lives. Scandals of desire, a lot of affairs, but these aren't hooks in a way that allows it to play with tropes in a more inventive, episodic manner.

Really appreciate that it aims for moral ambiguity, that works for me more with each ep, and watching these actorz is a treat when you can't expect nuance or camp 'til you're already involved.