Stranger Things

[Candiru]

Graboids are the shit.

[auxien]

I'm in a weird mood today, so don't read too much into this...but just in case you were wondering, graboids porn, as one would expect with Rule 34 being generally valid, does in fact exist.

[Amen Lare]

I'm in a weird mood today, so don't read too much into this...but just in case you were wondering, graboids porn, as one would expect with Rule 34 being generally valid, does in fact exist.

 

Seems logical, a phallic creature with labia-esque oral capabilities, basically a hermaphrodite

[Rubin Farr]

[hello spiral]

Kill me now

[doublename]

Gross

[joshuatxuk]

 

I'm in a weird mood today, so don't read too much into this...but just in case you were wondering, graboids porn, as one would expect with Rule 34 being generally valid, does in fact exist.

 

Seems logical, a phallic creature with labia-esque oral capabilities, basically a hermaphrodite

 

 

Before I scrolled up to realize graboids are from Tremors I though you meant that guy from late 80s/early 90s Dominos commercials

 

[olo]

[Lada Laika]

"fortified with Eleven's vitamins" wait so the waffles are made out of a small child?

[whosebrian]

[dumplings]

 

 

^ These are the types of fellas you see down Shoreditch.

[NI64]

Watched the first episode last night - seemed pretty solid, more of the same, mostly. Kind of hoping they try more original ideas this season instead of just rehashing every plot element from other movies. But who knows, either way it's really well made and fun to watch. 

 

Also granted, the soundtrack is great, but part of me wonders just how much better it could've been if VHS Head did it. *Listens to Persistence of Vision for the millionth time*

[Lada Laika]

First half was better than the second half, just like last time. Nice of Netflix to increase the FX budget but seriously guys, less is more. Still enjoyed it well enough, and still don't understand the massive, obsessive following it has. So it goes.

 

 

Also episode 7 was the most blatant backdoor pilot I've ever seen.

 

[dr lopez]

i've warmed to this show i guess. only good when you really have nothing to do but i do appreciate that it understands it is pulp. at least i hope it does, because it is very silly but easy to watch. The kids are p good which is almost impossible to pull off and david harbour is actually not bad. big fat sean astin is great ruuudyyyyyyyy

[TubularCorporation]

Oh weird, I just got to episode 5 of the new season and it was directed by the kid who grew up down the block from me.  e was just leaving for college around when I got in to high school.

 

I mean it's not that weird given how well he did for himself but it's still weird to see, I just remember him and his brother as the ones who always had really gory setpieces set up for trick or treaters.  Last time  saw him I was maybe 11 and he was bursting out the front door firing an (empty, of course) staple gun at my face while his brother flailed around with fake blood all over him, made up so it looked like there were staples and pencils stuck in his face and neck.

 

Directing a Stranger Things episode fits with my image of him a lot better than stuff like creating the Toy Story franchise.

[eugene]

i only really enjoyed about 5 minutes in this 9 hour run, the bit where the huge shadow thing brutally penetrates the sickly, gay looking kid with intermittent flashbacks of fat hobbit giving advice on how to confront fear and bullies. it was an amusing mix of horror, cynicism and self aware gleefulness. besides that, it was mostly all those trite and worn out portrayals of teenage difficulties of getting to kiss girls/fight poorly conceived cgi dogs/deal with parents etc with 80's presets. a lot of time wasted on secondary stories/sequel preparations with that x-men girl story and that pointless romance+conspiracy stuff with the indie geek and the girl with a scrawny face.

overall, it's the very rigid formularity of writing/production that pisses me off. you can see clearly the purpose of every move and scene and predict perfectly how it'll develop and how it'll interlink with other things or become important later on. it doesn't even feel like writing of actual people, more like following some kind of handbook, ticking the checkboxes and meeting expectations of some statistical average of the viewer base.

[dr lopez]

brett gelman was hard to watch lol

[dr lopez]

there's no way this can go for another season. it needs to end here. already feeling a bit thin

[Lada Laika]

there's no way this can go for another season. it needs to end here. already feeling a bit thin

You can definitely tell it was pitched as an anthology series and they pivoted because it blew up

[Lada Laika]

 

 

there's no way this can go for another season. it needs to end here. already feeling a bit thin

You can definitely tell it was pitched as an anthology series and they pivoted because it blew up

as in originally each season would feature a different cast and setting but due to the success of the first one they decided to repeat with the same cast?

Yes, and it would also explain the vagueness of the series' title.

 

Although I would imagine they would have reused occasional cast members like American Horror Story.

[TubularCorporation]

i only really enjoyed about 5 minutes in this 9 hour run, the bit where the huge shadow thing brutally penetrates the sickly, gay looking kid with intermittent flashbacks of fat hobbit giving advice on how to confront fear and bullies. it was an amusing mix of horror, cynicism and self aware gleefulness. besides that, it was mostly all those trite and worn out portrayals of teenage difficulties of getting to kiss girls/fight poorly conceived cgi dogs/deal with parents etc with 80's presets. a lot of time wasted on secondary stories/sequel preparations with that x-men girl story and that pointless romance+conspiracy stuff with the indie geek and the girl with a scrawny face.

overall, it's the very rigid formularity of writing/production that pisses me off. you can see clearly the purpose of every move and scene and predict perfectly how it'll develop and how it'll interlink with other things or become important later on. it doesn't even feel like writing of actual people, more like following some kind of handbook, ticking the checkboxes and meeting expectations of some statistical average of the viewer base.

 

That's how I feel about most things made in the last couple decades.  I think screenwriting software, with its systems for managing characters and narrative arcs and things, isn't given enough blame for the cookie cutter state of mainstream screenwriting today.  It' like how back in the 90s you could look at advances in curved surface modelling and the next year every new car model would look like it was the result of an exercise to learn the previous year's new modelling tools.  Especially when Rhino 3d left beta, it was like a joke.

 

Not that technology hasn't always influenced art and vice versa (and not that cookie-cutter formulaic screenplays haven't been a big part of the film world since the beginning - probably the majority of studio films made at any given times are like that, we've just forgotten them over time) but it's different since computer technology made it possible to micomanage and automate the creative process for efficiency (i.e. minimizing costs) to such an unprecedented degree. I've talked to a few small-time screenwriters about this over the years and they've all agreed, for what that's worth.

 

And at least the CGI doesn't look as anachronistic and disappointing in this one, even if the images it's used to create aren't as interesting.

 

There's virtually no real character development in this season, even with the new characters, and that's the biggest issue I think.  What made the first one work so well was that it was actually a very character driven narrative hidden under what should have been an annoyingly heavy-handed "80s retro" cash in piece but completely transcended that on strength of its characters.

 

I feel like this one owes a debt to Tobe Hooper's Invaders From Mars where the first one was more of an amalgam of It and Firestarter with a bit of Goonies.  They both seem to draw a lot from Roland Emmerich's Joey (aka Making Contact),

 

The original music in this one is really bland and poorly edited, that's my biggest complaint.  Not a single memorable piece yet and they jsut drop in different bits of it that don't flow together at all, compositionally or in terms of the way they'll just fade them in and out without any real sense of a larger coherency to the score, like the music editing in a soap opera. The music in the first season was kind of derivative and less interesting than it's given credit for but it still worked well and was fun, and it certainly never detracted.

 

Anyhow, I'm enjoying the current season despite its flaws but if I hadn't watched season 1 I wouldn't have made it more than an episode or two in. For me it still works as a kind of pastiche of a predictable, overloaded 80s sequel where the first one was a pastiche of a genre-transcending surprise hit of the same period (even though it's not even really a pastiche anymore, it doesn't actually look or feel at all like a mid 80s prouction at all, something that the first one mostly pulled off despite plenty of little anachronisms, mostly in the dialogue).

 

It's still less disappointing than season 2 of Twin Peaks at least.

[zaphod]

i've warmed to this show i guess. only good when you really have nothing to do but i do appreciate that it understands it is pulp. at least i hope it does, because it is very silly but easy to watch. The kids are p good which is almost impossible to pull off and david harbour is actually not bad. big fat sean astin is great ruuudyyyyyyyy

 

you've grown weak in your old age

[bendish]

the 80s nostalgia is starting to get on my nerves...i know thats the point but still...

 

some of the adr and sound design is shit too

 

i am however happy to waste 10 hours of my life watching the second series

[TubularCorporation]

Yeah, basically I recognize all of the problems with it (and 80s nostalgia was already well on my nerves when the first season came out, I almost didn't watch it because of that) but I'm still enjoying it despite all that.  IT's a guilty pleasure I guess, and I've had an unusually busy week at work so it's been a decent way to just turn my brain off for a few evenings.

[TubularCorporation]

I wonder how the increased awareness of the embrace of 80s synthpop and modern synthwave by neofascists over the past few years (for example, one of the things that was in the recent Breitbart email leak was Devin Saucier, director of the white nationalist organization Youth for Western Civilization, specifically naming synthpop and related styles as cultural signifiers "improtant to the movement" during the ongoing discussion with Milo Yiannopolis and Steve Bannon about how to repackage neofascist an white supremacist philosophy in a more broadly marketable way) will impact the course of the 80s nostalgia trend.  I'm guessing not at all, and I'm not so sure I'd want it to since I doubt many o the people making it are on board with that (I hope).