Hidden Gems of Amazon Prime instant videos

Really enjoyed One Night in Miami.

I don’t know if it’s a regional thing (probably) but Star Trek: Below Decks has cropped up on prime here in the UK.

Not seeing it here in the U.S. but I’m not seeing it when I use my VPN to connect from a UK gateway either.

Sorbicol wrote:

I don’t know if it’s a regional thing (probably) but Star Trek: Below Decks has cropped up on prime here in the UK.

Has also appeared on Prime here in Australia.

Title is Star Trek: Lower Decks btw. Once I searched for the right terms, it popped up. Appears to require CBS All Access subscription here in the US. Amazon seems to have updated their app as the subscription is still required when connected through a VPN in a country like the UK where the show - and others like ST: Discovery - are offered on Prime for free.

Yeah all the new Trek everything is locked to CBS All-Access in the USA (and maybe Canada?). Everywhere else in the world they are on Netflix (Discovery) or Amazon Prime (Picard, Lower Decks).

Stele wrote:

Yeah all the new Trek everything is locked to CBS All-Access in the USA (and maybe Canada?). Everywhere else in the world they are on Netflix (Discovery) or Amazon Prime (Picard, Lower Decks).

I love being screwed on the price of a thing for being in the country that produces the thing!

Kinda like Brits get screwed to the wall on watching the EPL.

Why doesn't Viacom play nice with CBS and Paramount productions like they do with Comedy Central ?

I am over half way through with Expanse season 4. It is SO GOOD!

What is so great about this show is that you fall in love with the minor characters. Some of them may last more than one season. Others may only get an episode or three. But you care about them all the same.

My wife asked me "who is my favorite character?" and how can anyone have one?
>You have the major characters - Amos, Naomi and Chrisjen (and to some extent Holden)
>You have the slightly less major characters - Bobby, Drummer, Ashford, Miller, Julie Mao (including her because the first three seasons were all about solving her mystery)
>You have minor++ characters - Arjun, Chrisjen's body guard, Amos's girlfriend, the inner doctor from s4, Amos's girlfriend, Fred Johnson, Dawes, the belter medic/mom from s4
>You have minor characters - Bobby's boyfriend, the blind boy on Ilus, the Mars cop/fencer, a handful of crew on the Kant, Mao's sister, the Ganymede dad (you're not that guy), the martian marines that aided Holden and crew escape in the Rocinante, the belter that Chrisjen tortures and hangs himself entering orbit, the guy (dealer?) that helps Bobby reach the beach

All of these characters have captivated my attention for minutes, hours or seasons. There is no wrong choice. (except for the pilot, of course, which is a shame since his "don't make me tell your daughter I let you die" moment is terrific)

Finished Expanse season 4

Spoiler:

Ashford, noooooooooooooooo :(

You mentioned boyfriends and girlfriends of some characters and I have no recollection of them. Thanks for reminding I'm old. Gosh darn it!

Amos's girlfriend Wei
Bobby's boyfriend = some random unemployed ex marine she picked up at a bar and is off to a 10 month mining contract
Ganymede dad and Amos friend (you're not that guy) = Prax Meng
Chrisjen's bodyguard = Cotyar Ghazi (he was so awesome RIP)

P.S. - I'm old too

Couldn't sleep last night and stumbled across a Jackie Chan movie I hadn't seen before: City Hunter. It's a live-action version of a same-named Japanese manga that was published in the 80s.

It's like a normal Jackie Chan movie, but the comedy and absurdity are turned up to 11. The fight choreography is exactly what you would expect from Chan with a memorable scene where he fights a baddie in an arcade that mimics several rounds of Street Fighter.

We watched "Sound of Metal" last night. It was amazing. The sound mixing/design is incredible. Highly recommended. If you're sad or particularly emotional right now, you might want to put it off for a bit because it is and emotional film. Not a tear-jerker or anything like that, it's just emotional.

We just finished watching The Great Escapists. It's a 6-episode thing where Richard Hammond and Tori Belachi get shipwrecked on a deserted island and build stuff to survive and try to escape. We like the Top Gear specials where they build ridiculous things in remote places, so figured this might be amusing.

Nope, it's Real Bad. All these kinds of things are always going to be scripted and contrived to some extent, but this one is extremely obviously scripted, and scripted really badly. The two of them seem to have okay chemistry, but you never really get to see that because literally everything they do on screen is pre-scripted, so you don't get any candid banter at all.

They do build some ridiculous things, but again, everything is completely scripted, so there's no bits where their contraption fails spectacularly and they have to deal with it. The Top Gear specials certainly had their share of scripted "accidents", but there also seemed to be genuine spectacular fails that were fun to watch.

All of that makes it way harder to deal with the super-contrived nature of everything. Early on, they "find" the wreck of the ship they were on, conveniently mostly intact (but unrepairable) and upright on the beach way above the tide line. Apparently that boat had a welder, steam engine, gas engine, full set of tools, etc. Early on, they rig up a series of gutters to channel water from a stream inland to the beach to power a water wheel that generates electricity. Later, a small part of the gutter system gets destroyed. Out of water, Tori shows us how he built a still to get drinkable water from his own urine, because apparently he's not able to repair the gutter or drink the water it was transporting. They also show you how a still works a second time in the same episode for some reason.

They don't even go into any kind of depth about how they're building the things they build. At best it's a really quick explainer of the basic idea, then cut to it's built and works great! None of the process bits are there at all. The only thing you're left with are these really contrived and badly scripted bits.

On top of all that, there's a framing device where they're being interrogated by some kind of detectives in a police station, and they use that to narrate during the episodes. They don't explain what's going on with that until the very last episode, so I was hoping for some kind of payoff. Nope, it's incredibly lame.

If you decide you still want to watch it, consider yourself warned.

One weird thing was that when we hit play on the first episode, it defaulted to the English with audio description language track. It took us a good ten minutes to realize that the lady calmly describing what was on-screen wasn't an odd Stanley Parable-style creative choice. Frankly, I think it might've been more interesting if we'd left it on.

Thanks for that. I was tempted to watch it because of Hammond, but I'll definitely stay away now.

What an odd combination of hosts to choose.

Chaz wrote:

We just finished watching The Great Escapists. It's a 6-episode thing where Richard Hammond and Tori Belachi get shipwrecked on a deserted island and build stuff to survive and try to escape. We like the Top Gear specials where they build ridiculous things in remote places, so figured this might be amusing. <>SNIP<>

While I certainly wouldn't deny that over all this show doesn't really work (and the scripting is mostly dreadfully unfunny), if you can take it face value then sometimes there's something quite endearing about it what's it's doing and how it does it.

Yes the contrivances are dreadfully contrived, but overall I think that's kinda the idea, you sort of have to go with those. As an education piece of various engineering and physics concepts, they do a fairly good job of "kitchen sink" explanations of how it works. If you take it seriously I think you are kind off missing the point. There are some very spectacular ideas in it they demonstrate extremely well ( the finale especially).

No, I didn't like the somewhat odd interrogation idea that basically serves as the exposition device for explaining what they are doing either.

However, if you have a passing interest in having some basic engineering principles explained to you in simple, demonstrable terms, you can do a lot worse. If you have teenage children - young teenage - I think they might get quite a bit out of it.

The Map of Tiny Perfect Things is an odd little YA Rom-Sci fi-com film that takes Groundhog Day (a film it repeatedly refers back to throughout its running time) updates to modern day and a younger audience and then throws as much ‘John Hughes-ness’ at it as it think it’ll get away with. The answer it which is a surprising amount.

Given I am clearly not the target audience for this type of thing I actually thought it was really quite good. Both the leads are very engaging and charismatic, and the film just about curtails the worst of the manic pixie dream girl / hunky geek guy stereotypes for their characters. The dialog is snappy and there is clear chemistry between them too. The time-loop is explained in a way that is at least scientifically literate which probably helped its personal appeal to me.

It’s not perfect - it’s more than a bit twee in places, some of the support cast feel a little tokenistic and it does hit the sentimentality button towards the end, but I did feel the film had earned the right to do that.

Taken at face value I thought it was pretty good. No classic for sure, but pretty good.

Been watching Small Axe movie or tv show series.

Mangrove is the true story of the Mangrove 9. In 1971 London police attacked a bunch of black people and brought them to trial on some BS charges. Nine of these people decided to defend themselves in court and were called the Mangrove 9. I really liked it.

Lovers Rock is the second Small Axe movie/tv episode. Here is a odd duck. There isn't a story to this. Basically we kind of follow a character around as she sneaks out to got to a party. It kind of feels like you are a guest at the party. People dance, good music is played, a little racism, a rape is stopped, and that is it. I liked it because it reminded me of the parties I went to as a kid. Be interesting to see if non black people like this.

Red, White and Blue is the third movie/episode. After seeing his dad beat by police Fynn decides to become a police officer in London. He gets hit by racism and hate from the black community for becoming a cop. This is also a real life story. I loved this movie episode. Best of the Small Axe movies so far.

Still have two more to watch.

Baron Of Hell wrote:

Been watching Small Axe movie or tv show series.

Watched these when they were on the BBC. They are all really good. As for your question about Lovers Rock, for me it felt like been given a window into a world I would never be able to know. Where as the other 4 films taught me about events and history, this one made me feel it. If that makes any sense.

Mortal is actually damn good movie. Without spoiling anything it is a fresh take on someone gaining powers and how they deal with it.

OG_slinger wrote:

Couldn't sleep last night and stumbled across a Jackie Chan movie I hadn't seen before: City Hunter. It's a live-action version of a same-named Japanese manga that was published in the 80s.

It's like a normal Jackie Chan movie, but the comedy and absurdity are turned up to 11. The fight choreography is exactly what you would expect from Chan with a memorable scene where he fights a baddie in an arcade that mimics several rounds of Street Fighter.

I did not expect to add "Saw Jackie Chan swing through the air on a dolphin while firing a machine gun" or "Jackie Chan doing a perfect Chun Li victory animation" to the highlights of the last years, but there it is! Thanks for the recommendation!

My partner and I started watching Truth Seekers this weekend. We both thought it was insanely bold and daring of the series to basically just drop you right into the action with zero exposition, although we must admit it was a little confusing to follow every thread immediately going on. It was as if everyone had established relationships and they expected you to just catch up. It also seemed crazy how quickly the supernatural event was dealt with, which led to major consequences for some characters and huge revelations.

Anyways, it turns out we somehow messed up and just watched the final episode of the season first.

Not sure if I'm going to go back and watch from the beginning now that it's been canned and I already know where everything's headed.

LeapingGnome wrote:

What an odd combination of hosts to choose.

I imagine Amazon paid a pretty penny for those Top Gear hosts because it seems like they keep shoving them into new series and specials non-stop.

Eddie Murphy was on the Tonight Show promoting Coming 2 America. They still didn't say the date, just like all the commercials lately, coming soon.

But I looked and the first movie is on Prime now in 4k. So going to watch that again this weekend. Been a lot of years since I've seen it not edited for TV.

Stele wrote:

Eddie Murphy was on the Tonight Show promoting Coming 2 America. They still didn't say the date, just like all the commercials lately, coming soon.

But I looked and the first movie is on Prime now in 4k. So going to watch that again this weekend. Been a lot of years since I've seen it not edited for TV.

The date has been advertised for a while: March 5. The original is one of my top two comedies ever, alongside Ghostbusters.

Season 3 of American Gods (available on Amazon Prime here in the UK) has been something of a return to form after the veritable shambles of Season 2, both on and off screen. It's returned much more to the source material, and while some of it has been weakened (Orlando Bloom has been dropped as Anansi, The African Spider God and to be blunt that was a bad call), but it has allowed Yatide Badaki's Bliquis to breathe much more which has certainly helped. Having Emily Browning's Laura Moon's character considerable more agency than she had in the books has similarly been a blessing, as Ricky Whittle's Shadow Moon is serviceable but nothing more and I really don't think he's quite good enough to carry the show when Ian McShane isn't on screen.

Fingers crossed they get to a season 4 but I think the jury is still out on whether or not that's going to happen. I do hope so though.

It's been a disappointment for me.
The season's beginning actually tricked me into thinking that they would focus on the book's storyline (and if that was the case this season should be able to be the series finale), but it quickly devolved into tangents. Most of the new storylines I just didn't care about and it's weird how characters just disappear between seasons.

I’m a bit let down by Invincible. The animation quality is really inconsistent and some of the voices seem miscast. Cecil especially. Walton Goggins and JK Simmons should probably have swapped characters. Also I know we aren’t supposed to like Rex but Jason Matzoukis’ portrayal is just too obnoxious.
One thing I did like and thought was super effective was the tonal shift in the first episode, though. It definitely caught my partner off-guard.

I was disappointed, and my expectations were already low. I quit reading both The Walking Dead and Invincible comics because Kirkman's dialogue just doesn’t work for me. It comes across as stilted and unrealistic. (I know it’ a comic, but still.) The show didn’t change my mind.