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Post by pacinoyes on Dec 16, 2023 9:34:21 GMT
The "Fliplanthropy" - "pilot" episode (8+ minutes) that ties into Episode 6 - so taking the satire to a deeper level ......posted by Fielder last night ........pretty clever meta stuff if you're into it........which you really should be
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Post by pacinoyes on Dec 23, 2023 18:12:03 GMT
S1, E7Everything falls apart. Brutal episode about lying, deep dread and the midpoint of free falling and self sabotage This actually felt like a finale ....... but so much is floating in the air ........before the fall
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Post by pacinoyes on Dec 29, 2023 19:25:42 GMT
s1, e8 Amazing, long and complex episode which ties audible doublespeak into the show's GOAT-level visual style. This might be the best thing I came across in 2023 actually - right up there at least There is a great sequence of events here where a character says "rape" and then changes it to "grape".....where Asher sings a self hating rap song (Dead Prez Hell Yeah - ?) - where Asher literally sings "the N word" not what the N word is ...........ie he "hides" the word.......where Dougie gets told directly - brutally "ask your wife".......when a character is recursed.....where twice characters are asked to say lines that will be used in a different context That's just the start - people laughing at Whitney but their face is off camera (but not to us) or almost crying and she won't see - - in fact when something that was ambiguous is clearly explained to her.........she doesn't care.......and a showstopper scene - this one, below where Stone made me gasp in what she said and how she said it.......where Asher I think literally says to her: ......"but you said" Phenomenal and layered..........
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Post by pacinoyes on Jan 5, 2024 8:56:41 GMT
s1, e9Nathan Fielder's best scene - at the end - and even THAT gets stolen by an extended close-up on the amazing Emma Stone's face - in what is sure to be part of her Emmy reel. Less visual tricks (though a great one in an Asian restaurant separating heads, from heads um and bodies too). Many sly plays on reality vs. filming, denying reality (a marvelously tense countdown scene fron 10 to 1), re-enacting flirtations rather than genuine ones ....Stone's reaction to Fielder's hand on her neck is priceless etc. Dynamite creepy opening and counterpoint finish, sly metaphors on exploitation and colonialism - or whatever fnck all you Leftist revolutionaries are blah, blah, blah'ing about. The speech near the end is actually a sly metaphor for Stone's Whitney juxtaposed withe closing: Stone in effect becomes everything she has claimed to despise - exploitative, selfish, rather cruel and in her way colonialist actually....in this episode even more like a child - and literally a child to her parents in a sharp, snarling confrontation .......episode 10 could go anywhere from that ending ........
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Post by pacinoyes on Jan 12, 2024 9:57:46 GMT
s1, e10Masterpiece - maybe......... and so dense it will need multiple rewatches for me to fully parse and (maybe) fully comprehend....... Makes the ending of Beef look simple Kafkaesque, "Art is about......sometimes you have to be extreme" (paraphrase)...........absurdist......evokes the kind of thing Beau is Afraid attempted (and fncking failed at), very rarely does this sort of thing not just disappear (literally), Charlie Kaufman-ish, jokes that are painfully funny and not........When Homes Attack being the funniest (hint: the bedroom is the most dangerous room, getit?) ........so visually i(and in sound design) nventive it makes every previous shot seem like a warm-up........a newborn baby separated by blinds .........the Cosmos.......puzzling......metaphorical.......an incredible tracking shot.......that obscures as much as it reveals.......... When the show comes back down .......if it ever comes back (down) who will be there anyway?
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Post by DeepArcher on Jan 13, 2024 4:00:55 GMT
Holy fucking shit! The curse is lifted. At times a tiresome and uneven show, but as it went along an expectedly insightful and hilarious send-up of performative progressivism (among many other things) that makes brilliant use of each of its three main actors. Whether the rest of the series "earns" it or not, that finale is without question the strangest, most surprising, most terrifying & deeply moving thing I've seen in a long, long time. Truly breathtaking!!
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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Jan 15, 2024 7:21:52 GMT
Asher attempting a funny face in the class icebreaker is going to haunt my nightmares for a while.
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Post by pacinoyes on Jan 15, 2024 15:12:02 GMT
It is really funny to read analysis of the finale - and finding the sweet spot where it exists between The Sopranos underrated but somewhat irresolute, audience closure denying ending ............and Seinfeld's ambitious but much worse (imo) finale........which didn't actually go absurdism enough and ended up just odd.......that's the genius of The Curse IF it doesn't come back The Curse's ending is so batshit, surreal and absurd and also unlike anything in Ep 1 through 9 and yet it is completely keeping with the shows thematic, visual and sound cues and template laid out in Ep 1 through 9....... It's been a few days now........really knocked out buy it, and the little clues placed within the episode earlier and when things occur (who owns that house again? Asher never goes back yanno.......) and the more you think of it - the more amazing it is........and lots of people - maybe MOST people atm - just haaaaaaaaaaaaaated it
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Post by stephen on Jan 17, 2024 1:13:43 GMT
Holy shit. So here's a fun fact about me: when I was a kid I went to an outdoor concert in Atlanta, and I suddenly got hit with a panic attack where I was mortally convinced my centralized gravity would suddenly cease to be and I would get rocketed up into the stratosphere with no way to stop me. It was such a lightning-bolt fear that came out of nowhere, and over a quarter of a century later I still remember white-knuckling it the whole day trying to figure out how to get to a place where if I did suddenly start floating, I'd at least hit an overhang or a tree or something to curb my ascent.
And now fucking Fielder and Safdie have taken that fear and realized it in such a harrowing way that it brought that old phobia right back to me. So well played, you assholes.
(Great finale, though.)
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Post by JangoB on Jan 18, 2024 2:00:41 GMT
The "Fliplanthropy" - "pilot" episode (8+ minutes) that ties into Episode 6 - so taking the satire to a deeper level ......posted by Fielder last night ........pretty clever meta stuff if you're into it........which you really should be I wasn't planning on watching the show but this video actually convinced me otherwise because I just kept laughing all the way through it. And now I've seen the whole thing! So thank you, Mr. Pacino Yes, for posting this Excellent show - absolutely hilarious all the way through, terrifically performed (with Emma Stone once again proving my belief in her being the greatest actress of her generation... and I haven't even seen Poor Things yet!), very sharp about personal relationships and expectations we put upon ourselves and others... plus, and this is important, a very entertaining and unpredictable satire of the whole HGTV thing. I've translated a few of those home renovation shows for local TV and I couldn't help but wonder what the deal was with the married hosts behind the scenes (I'm talking about Ben and Erin Napier, the show being "Home Town"). They did their job, everything was slickly put together and all that but something about them felt off to me, as if they secretly resented each other, at least on some level. To watch a whole series diving precisely into that matter was especially fun for me. And those HGTV show imitations they did (including the YT clip above) were just perfect.
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Post by JangoB on Jan 18, 2024 2:19:49 GMT
Oh, and of course all the stuff having to do with "HELPING THE COMMUNITY" was fucking laugh-out-loud funny. A people pleaser and a people repulser joining forces to self-righteously assert themselves somewhere they don't belong is a hurricane of wrong.
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Post by pacinoyes on Jan 18, 2024 2:28:12 GMT
Oh, and of course all the stuff having to do with "HELPING THE COMMUNITY" was fucking laugh-out-loud funny. Very much so............I also posted about in this thread movie-awards-redux.freeforums.net/post/482028 - and that part of the show where they are both heroes and villains simultaneously is really inspired........how everything they present - helping the community, "passive housing", Indigineous Art always doubles back on them...........the show is insanely sharp about when it eventually comes back to things brought 2 or 3 episodes prior.......
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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Jan 18, 2024 17:54:01 GMT
as bonkers, creative and absolutely terrifying as that finale was, the farther I get from it the less satisfying it feels. It spends almost its entire 69-minute runtime on this nightmare scenario post-timejump and not enough on resolving plotlines and tying off loose ends. It stands alone from the rest of the episodes for better and for worse. I prefer the penultimate "Young Hearts".
But all in all this was a really interesting if sometimes tedious show. The satire struck a balance between wickedly funny (the house "gifting" scene, the air conditioning exchange with the potential buyers), and deeply unsettling (Asher spilling Gatorade in the office, the class icebreaker sequence, Whitney forcing Cara on-camera to praise Whitney's homes), but had its fair share of bloat too, like the 10-minute scavenger hunt with Dougie opening up episode 4. If there's a season 2 I'll definitely check it out as I think the story has more than enough room to grow with Whitney continuing to build her HGTV empire while silently exploiting the community on the DL under a guise of performative self-righteous progressivism, but Asher will be sorely missed. Stone is justifiably being praised for her performance but Fielder deserves nothing but praise for how he integrated the awkwardness of his Nathan for You and Rehearsal projects into a fictional dramatic setting like this while dialing up the creepiness to 11. Asher is a wonderfully unsettling character that will be missed if the show continues. I hope Fielder does more dramatic work.
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Post by pacinoyes on Jan 23, 2024 7:33:52 GMT
According to Safdie - the ending was always the ending - and is how they started www.avclub.com/benny-safdie-confirms-the-curse-s-ending-was-always-th-1851187593 “From the beginning, this was always the ending,” Safdie told the audience at last week’s screening of episode 10, rejecting any Monday morning show running that they didn’t know how to end this thing. When Film at Lincoln Center Assistant Programmer Maddie Whittle asked how he “reverse engineered” the show from that scene, Safdie, who spent much of the talk avoiding any specific readings of the episode, said, “Well, originally, he floats away but very slowly and then, practically speaking, we’re like ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be more exciting if it was reverse gravity and so then it was literally like falling off a cliff upwards.”
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Post by JangoB on Jan 26, 2024 1:06:41 GMT
Nolan did a Q&A for this:
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futuretrunks
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Post by futuretrunks on Jan 28, 2024 0:11:59 GMT
Aside from being too purposeless, I don't think this show is well-sculpted. So many protracted scenes to the point of exasperation. It's not even close to the level of The Bear, Beef, and Succession. It's an indulgent curio with some interesting weird moments.
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rhodoraonline
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Post by rhodoraonline on Jan 30, 2024 1:29:51 GMT
Watched the first episode, didn't get the appeal. None of the hype I've been hearing checked out in the first episode to me personally (except for the raves for Emma). Not sure if I wanna give the next episode a try...
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Post by Kings_Requiem on Feb 1, 2024 2:58:54 GMT
It's definitely worth watching. The highs are extremely high. The comedy is cringe of the highest order and the drama is searing and insightful. My issue with it is that it never really picks a lane. A lot of weirdness and potentially creepy things/ideas are introduced but then the show proceeds to pussyfoot around and never really expand upon them. I do wonder if this would've worked better as a film. Give it a 2 hour runtime and maybe the whole thing comes out much more smoothly? I do think 9 or 10 hours was a bit too much, but I'm not sure 2 would've been enough. There is a lot of ground to cover thematically and I just wonder if more of an effort could've been taken to streamline it better. I don't know, maybe not.
The performances are all top notch. Fielder is masterful. He plays Asher with an overinflated sense of self importance, a naive and frugal man whose seemingly perfect life slowly goes down the toilet as he's revealed to be much more fragile a man than originally thought. Stone is operating on a completely different level than she ever has previously. Her Whitney is a special creation that deserves to be recognized as not only the best of the year but also the best of her career. She's also very naive in that she believes what her and Asher are doing is all for the better of the community and she's blinded by that. Refusing to see that what she's doing and saying to these people is actually doing more harm than good. There's a scene between Stone and Fielder near the end of episode 8 I think it is where she absolutely eviscerates and emasculates Asher in a showing of emotion that is quite shocking to witness after she's spent the entire series up to this point keeping her cards close to her chest. Benny Safdie, who has already proven himself a worthy film-maker has also been killing it as an actor recently. He plays Dougie with a perfect combination of smarm and here's that word again, naivety. A man who thinks he has his finger on the pulse of what tv viewers really want but when it really comes down to it doesn't have a clue. But at the same time he has an innate ability to push others into doing things his way but making it seem like it was their idea in the first place.
The show tries to comment on many topics and themes and ultimately I think it bites off more than it can chew. It goes for broke which I love and I'm never going to begrudge writers/directors for doing something different, but I think there are too many strings that are pulled on and left hanging. Not explored to the fullest extent. This was at its best when it focused on the relationships and dove deep into the personal inner-workings of Asher and Whitney's marriage. Their dynamic was so good and chemistry so palpable that any time it cut away from them to focus on whatever other randomness it slowed everything way down and made it feel like the show was just spinning its wheels. Which brings me to my issue with the ending - it's interesting in theory, but maybe not quite interesting enough to be the conclusion to this particular story. Benny Safdie said in an interview that the ending was written first and the show was built around it. The problem with doing that is you become beholden to that ending. You don't realize that by the time you get to the end of your story, that ending you created your show out of doesn't really fit anymore. So, while it certainly gets people talking about how wild and crazy it is (which I suppose was the entire intent anyway) it definitely feels more like it's done for shock value instead of ending on a more real and cohesive note.
With all that being said I do really like the show and will likely revisit it in the future. The good far outweighs the bad in this case. I don't know that it needs another season, though. Mostly because I'm not sure where it could go, but also because it doesn't feel like the type of show that goes on for multiple seasons. Time will tell.
Now, I'm going to add one more silly but reductive thought/critique: At one point while watching something popped into my head and I decided to file it away until now. The Curse is like Atlanta for white people. It's the kind of statement that people would normally brush off but maybe holds a bit more weight when you actually sit down to think about it and dive deep on both shows.
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Post by Nikan on Mar 18, 2024 23:21:32 GMT
The recent Stone fever I got (can't be the only one right?) lead to me to finally check this out... 2 Episodes in and bro this show is so uncomfortable
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Post by pacinoyes on Mar 19, 2024 7:27:38 GMT
The recent Stone fever I got (can't be the only one right?) lead to me to finally check this out... 2 Episodes in and bro this show is so uncomfortable It gets worse! I mean better.....oh you know what I mean........ It's one of the very few great works of Art imo to specifically deal with (non-ironic) Woke, or fanatical / hypocritical Leftist political slant in America and use that as a launching point of great Art instead of pandering virtue signalling.............very much like Tar which it somewhat rivals in the unclear, shifting ways you view the female lead - both of whom are beyond brilliant in their performances........ I recently criticized Love Lies Bleeding for its batshit turn at the end........... The Curse is equally batshit.....equally fantasist or equally "magical realism" (not sure the term technically fits) and yet I loved it in The Curse The visual design and sound design of this show is ingenious - particularly for comedy or is The Curse a horror (?) - even some of the posters hint at the complex ideas in visual cues - mirrors, obstructed views, people bifurcated by walls or doors or panels........refracted foregrounds and backgrounds......... The Curse is the definition of a show that many, many people will hate - a comedy without laughs, a drama without resolution, a horror in the mundane..........and those people are flat out wrong........
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Nikan
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Post by Nikan on Mar 21, 2024 22:37:46 GMT
Ep. 8 the way Stone chillingly "mimics" Fielder's nice-guy persona ( existence I'd say)... faaam *and that was quite a finale for all the Stone adoration, I have to give Fielder and especially Safdie their flowers... really liked what Barkhad Abdi and Nizhonniya Luxi Austin added to their scenes too.
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Post by pacinoyes on Apr 25, 2024 17:37:21 GMT
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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Apr 25, 2024 17:52:48 GMT
I really hope so tbh. Only one season with this Stone performance would be a shame.
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