HBO Max - Recommendations and Exclusives (as of 5/23/23: Just Max)

Nice! It’s pretty cheesy at times, but the is a guilty pleasure.

So I just watched Warrior Season 2 Episode 9, “Enter the Dragon” and despite the cheesy martial arts title the episode is actually just as dramatic as it is martial-artsy. That was a very freakin’ strong episode.

It took me a while to get into this show, but Season 2 is actually better than 1 in my opinion and the latter part of season 2 even better.

I’m glad it got a 3rd season order b/c the creative team was definitely cooking with gas by the end of Season 2. (I haven’t watched the S2 finale yet…)

Mare of Easttown looks interesting. Just watched the first episode. It captures small-town America pretty well. Could be great. Kate Winslet’s body language is really good, but her expression is pretty one note for nearly the whole first episode. My initial take was that she kind of pushed the accent too hard and flubbed it a bit, but apparently it’s a “Delco” Philly accent and the O’s really do sound like that. Maybe @Timex can confirm.

I hope Cailee Spaeny gets more work–she’s super impressive. Compare this performance to her part in Devs or Bad Times at the El Royale. She just disappears into a role.

And I’m not sure what it is about Guy Pearce. That guy just has some kind of charisma that’s hard to pin down.

Anyway, the first episode is all setup. I’m curious where it goes from here.

I didn’t realize The Nevers was being released weekly, not all at once, so the wife and I sat down to begin a binge on Saturday night and…saw the pilot episode.

We enjoyed it. The setting (late Victorian London) is very well realized and utilized, and the central premise is interesting (though you have to get to the end of the pilot episode to even understand what that premise is). The two lead actresses do a fantastic job with their characters and have a real chemistry from the start, though many of the supporting actors are either not as talented or are not given much to work with. Really the only criticism I can level at the show (excluding criticism of Joss Whedon’s troubles, as the vast number of other people involved with the show don’t deserve to be punished because Joss is an asshole) is that it tries to take on too much all at once, and becomes a confusing jumble of characters, events and even timelines from the very start of the pilot episode. As mentioned previously, this kind of sorts itself out at the end of the episode when viewers see the events that set everything else in motion, but it doesn’t bode well for future episodes that the storytelling here is frenetic and often confusing.

Still, we’re in for now, and are curious to see where it goes. We did not watch the second episode when it premiered last night, but will likely watch tonight or tomorrow.

Yeah, we’re probably 5-10 minutes into that first episode before I at least started to get a handle on who any of these people were or why I should care about them. And even then, there’s a ton of people to keep track of and plotlines.

Nevers also has its own thread:

Does anyone know when (time) these simultaneous theater movies leave HBO Max? I can see Godzilla vs Kong leaves April 30, but is it available the evening of the 30th (Friday), or is it gone Thursday night? It is a thing as one of our girls really wants to watch it, but we won’t have a custody swap window until Friday evening. I figured rental options will be a long way out. We don’t have HBO Max now.

Also, how does one watch HBO Max? All I can see as an option seems to be a PS4 app. The smart TVs (LG CX) doesn’t seem to have an app option.

I don’t know when part 2 got added, but both part 1 and part 2 of Primal are up now.

I watched the first few minutes of Mare, and it is really well done so far, but for me it’s too bleak. Every person they’ve introduced is just miserable. Maybe that will change, and maybe I will give it another chance if I’m in a better mood or something.

Having watched episode 2 of Mare, I can say that, yes, it stays bleak. One thing you can say for it, though: it is not one of those glacially paced shows where everyone just slowly marinates in the bleakness. Instead it rumbles right along at a fast clip, with new things happening left and right.

They’re all bleak things, of course. But it makes a nice change of pace from the usual “wait until episode 3 for something to happen” you often find in this subgenre of HBO show.

Isn’t this rural Pennsylvania? I’ve always imagined that as pretty damn bleak.

Rural PA is pretty much all forested mountains and farmland. Not really that bleak.

The bleaker parts of PA tend to be the old industrial towns and cities that are no longer operating as industrial hubs.

Yeah, i guess that’s what I was thinking about as ‘rural’ - post-industrial sorts of things. Here in the PNW they’re all old logging/mill towns, and what I think of as rural, even if there’s a city/town there. I figured it was the same around there.

At the risk of sounding like an old fogey, do you not have some way of recording it before it disappears?

They specifically don’t want you doing that and have a bunch of protections against it (and thereby screw over legitimate PC subscribers).

I can’t remember exact dates, but I also was in a similar situation with Judas and the Black Messiah, where I wanted to watch it before it went away, and I was wondering if they would have it for that last day or if it would disappear that day, and luckily they had it for that whole last day. So given that past experience, I’d say Godzilla vs King should be viewable all day on April 30th.

Re: Mare, thanks for the info, it’s pretty much what I anticipated. Again, it was all really well done, while creating a mood/feel I’m just not into. The girl who is dealing with the jerk boyfriend getting his turn with the baby bummed me out.

We watched this last night as well. I don’t know if I’d use the term “bleak”. These folks are just regular folks living their messy lives in a small town where everyone knows everyone. And then murder happens, which hits like a maelstrom, affecting everything and everyone. Mare herself is deeply damaged and Kate Winslet really leans into that well, plays her without a single ounce of vanity. She’s an attractive but tired and wounded woman in her mid 40’s. I loved the scene where she opens the tube of lipstick and it’s covered in dust and hair. And the whole sequence at Guy Pierce’s party was amazing and perfect in every detail and expression.

And all of the characters are pretty well drawn. Well except for Erin’s dad and the bitchy girlfriend of Erin’s baby’s dad, who we’re given no reason to sympathize with. But the rest of the cast seem like well-drawn characters just trying to do their thing.

The whole resentful cop routine is a bit cliched though. One thing I really like about Fargo is that, in spite of its whole heightened reality thing, the (non-corrupt) cops all act like pros–no more, no less. A cop comes from another jurisdiction to lend a hand and they graciously accept the assistance and cooperate professionally on the investigation. Mare being a resentful git who slowly warms to the charming younger cop is dumb.

I did find a couple of events at the end of episode 2 kind of threw me out of the show a bit: Erin’s dad taking the kid out to the woods to shoot him, and Frank being revealed as the potential father of Erin’s child. Does the show really need to get more complicated than it already is? We’ll see how that stuff develops, but it’s starting to feel more like a soap than a procedural.

The Great Pottery Throwdown is Great British Bake Off, but cooking things takes at least 24 hours and, oh yeah, everything is made of clay. Otherwise, expect the same pleasant competition, diverse British accents, and mix of soaring successes and miserable failures. I should also add that instead of being a hard-ass who occasionally shakes your hand, the star judge has a habit of crying when he loves someone’s work or their dedication.

I watched all four seasons in the course of a few weeks. Really enjoyed it.

As much as I dislike most competition shows, my daughters got me started on Bake Off and when they lost interest, I kept watching and caught up on all the seasons. No need for manufactured drama. The drama is in the skills and success or failure of what they are preparing.

We did watch Blown Away and enjoyed it for much the same reason, though the the host whose input is “I think this is awesome” and is not amusing at all makes it less enjoyable.

We tried Forged in Fire. Ugh. It was tedious for many reasons.

Thanks for the recommendation!