That looks Great, as in it looks like Hulu’s The Great, in a slightly more modern and a little less historically accurate setting. Hope it’s as great as that other show.
you were SOOO close!
Great job!
That feels like a later Gene Wolfe novel.
If it has Kate Winslet in it I’ll at the very least give it a try. She’s awesome.
Indeed she is. And it is a treat to watch her inhabit a character for a whole series (Mare of Easttown) rather than just a two-hour film.
Mare of Easttown was a bit too… miserable… for me? I loved her acting, but I had trouble connecting to the events and characters in the series and just dropped it midway through. It wasn’t enjoyable for me at all. But she was stellar in that, in terms of acting, no doubt.
Arise!
Wife and I watched it last night knowing nothing about it except Kate Winslet. During opening credits I’m told that Will Tracy was the writer for The Menu (a movie I’ve not watched but know a little about by reputation). So, yeah… it’s a bit ‘weird’ and off-beat. But it a good way. Trying to think of how else to describe it. I keep coming back to it giving me a certain Dr. Strangelove vibe.
It’s pretty good. The only annoying thing is I kept trying to figure out which “central European” country it was and coming up empty. It’s a Chancellor like Merkel, but it’s turning authoritarian like Hungary but the lions look like Georgia.
I thought Kate Winslet was excellent – like that’s a surprise – but the rest of this just felt not great. By untethering it from any specific country or such, it feels like if you made Veep or The Thick Of It without pairing it to specifics to provide the grounding. It just felt like unlikeable characters doing unlikeable things, without being able to truly root itself in full satire because it pulls its punches.
I hope it gets better, but I’ll skip until all the episodes are in and someone tells me this is worth investing more time into.
You have my attention.
Heh, a couple of shot compositions in this (the council chamber) are cribbed from the War Room scene in Dr. Strangelove, which no doubt causes the comparison.
I wasn’t sure if I was going to watch this, but the presence of the The Menu screenwriter, along with Winslet and Stephen Frears, pushed me over the edge. It’s alright, but, as triggercut says, the lack of any clear referent takes a lot of the bite out of it. It feels less like satire and more like just a story about a fairy tale kingdom that happens to have a mad, authoritarian ruler in it. But we have mad authoritarian would-be rulers at home, we don’t need to make up a fantasy realm to tell stories about one.
It wants to be The Death of Stalin but isn’t. But, on the other hand, it’s not anywhere as dire as Avenue 5 either, so maybe I’ll continue to check it out?