End of watch was basically a movie LOADED with a serious message about racism etc. And then the white cop dude survives.
Would’ve been the pitch.
Peter Jacksons country of birth Australia has a show called Top of the lakes, or something. It’s meant to be ok. Also what’s the difference between Russell Crowe and Mel Gibson?
One of them will make you burn his house down, and blow him beforehand, the other ate all the pies.
Fact: Crowe actually called Joquim Phoenix ‘the chocolate prince’, whilst filming Gladiator, which has also aged terribly, unlike the one with the elf, Islam and the dude from Taken.
Thanks for mentioning this. I’ve somehow never heard of this show before. Just watched the first episode and it’s great.
Newly loaded documentary called Harvard Beats Yale, 29-29 is up, and I found it fascinating and incredibly interesting. It’s one of those films where I think “I’m just gonna watch a few minutes” and then you’re hooked and taking in the whole thing.
I guess it’s a sports documentary, about the annual Harvard-Yale football game in 1968. Yale was very good, undefeated and ranked 16th in the country. Tailback Calvin Hill would have a nice NFL career. Quarterback Brian Dowling was the model for the character his classmate Garry Trudeau made famous as BD in Doonesbury. Because of the obvious intelligence and interesting stories of the players, and because of the year–1968–it’s about more than the football game, but in the end…it’s about the football game, one I had zero knowledge of and feel like know I should have. I enjoyed it a great deal.
Honestly, I tried to read past this part of your post. I really did. A couple of times. But I just couldn’t do it… :(
-Tom
Cool story bro, didn’t know you didn’t like sports.
That documentary has been on Netflix before. Not sure if it went away and came back…?
Aleck
3107
Tom, it’s really worth watching. Sports? Sort of. Irony and humor? Yeah.
Yeah worth noting (although it isn’t mentioned in the film that I remember) is that because Harvard and Yale are Ivy League schools, that means no athletic scholarships (a practice that continues to this day). These aren’t your typical dumb jocks. Every single one of them had to earn their way into Harvard or Yale based on academics first, athletics second.
It’s not just the sports. It’s the documentary. Since documentaries aren’t movies, I have a hard time watching them. Mainly I was griefing triggercut for watching too many documentaries and not enough movies, such as GI Joe: Retaliation, After Earth, and Fast and Furious 6.
-Tom
I’m not a huge sports fan (watch some basketball every now and again, mostly during playoffs, a handful of soccer matches a year, that’s about it), but I still find sports documentaries fun to watch, so I’ll check this out.
But clarify this for me, will ya? 16th in the country and UNDEFEATED? So were there also 15 other undefeated teams that year? Is that usual for college football? I’m just equating “undefeated” with #1.
Being undefeated and where a school is ranked do not necessarily correlate. Being ranked #1–or anywhere in the top 25–has more to do with power ratings, reputation, and strength-of-schedule, which is in turn wrapped up in what conference you are in and the reputation of that conference. So an Ivy League school could be undefeated and ranked well below a Big Ten school with a couple of losses. This is one of the major reasons why folks have been clamoring for some kind of play-off system in college football. Now and historically the national championship game is determined by ranking votes (and a bunch of back room bullshit). A team like, I don’t know, Boise State could reach the end of the season as the only undefeated team in Division I and not get to play for the national championship because of what I mention above. Because who gets ranked has less to do with record and ability than reputation and schedule.
All of this is to say that college basketball is clearly superior to college football. So suck it documentary about college football.
-xtien
Christien covered it pretty well.
Again, understand that Ivy League schools then and through present times do NOT offer athletic scholarships. Even a school with unassailable academics like Stanford or Michigan or UVA or wherever hand out 25-35 four-year athletic scholarships per year for football.
And so in 1968 Yale played 9 games (not 12 or 13 games per year like schools play now) and 8 of those games were against other Ivy League schools. The ninth was against UConn, back when football at UConn was a non-scholarship, division III sport.
The voters who vote in the polls for college football rankings take such scheduling into account.
As for the movie itself, I’m kind of fascinated with 1968 as a year in history, and I’m that dork from high school who read Doonesbury before any of the other comics, so that’s the other way–besides SPORTS!–that this got its hooks in me.
:)
I want to see a Hearts Of Darkness-style documentary about the tortured creativity process that surrounded the creation of Fast and Furious 6.
If you think documentaries aren’t movies with location scouts, filming, editing, plot, flow, and narrative … then you’ve never made a documentary. Unless younare using the word movie in some way I’m not familiar with, such as an analogy where novel:book as movie:???.
Well, you got me there. I have indeed never made a documentary. Busted!
-Tom
It’s got Tommy Lee Jones! I had a hard time picturing Harvard as the scrappy underdogs the movie (er, documentary) wants you to see. I mean, Harvard? Ivy League? Not the answers you expect when you pick Scrappy for 500, right?
EDIT: Tom went to Harvard and he’s not scrappy! :)
Has anyone seen Copper on Watch Instantly? A BBC show about the 5 points in 1864, focused on an Irish detective. I really liked it. Some holes in the story, but overall a good job.
I just watched the first episode (of Copper). I found it quite strong for a first episode, and if they can build on that I’ll keep watching. It’s a bit heavy on the cliches, but shows where episode 1 isn’t total crap are rare.
One thing that bugs me though…the theme sounds like an arrangement of “I’m Shipping up to Boston”, or perhaps a tribute, but I don’t see that mentioned on any info I found about the soundtrack.
JoshL
3120
Well, I watched “A Horrible Way To Die” because Tom recommended it. Well, now that I think about it, I don’t know if he actually recommended it, or if he just said Amy Seimetz was good in it. Well, she was very good in it. And the story was decent. I thought the AJ Bowen guy was pretty good too. Joe Swanburg (“Kevin”) was the weak link if anyone was, or maybe he was just outclassed by Amy Seimetz (Bowen didn’t have many scenes with Seimetz).
But the problem with it was the camera work. It was beyond hand-held shaky-cam. This movie made Blair Witch look like The Shining (or a Kevin Smith movie). The camera would swing around wildly, to the point where the characters were only in frame half the time. Also, focus would go in and out. Probably half the movie was looking at out-of-focus lights. It was beyond nauseating and well into unwatchable. I looked it up on IMDB and noticed that the director was also the camera operator and editor. So I’ll know not to watch any Adam Wingard movies in the future.
