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Timeless Appeal posted:Gray Matter-it's "gray" as in the color not the surname. Lesson for life: "Gray" is the color and British English uses "Grey" as both a colour and a surname. Example: 50 Shades of Grey. Capntastic posted:Breaking Bad is, to me, a gleaming beacon of what a creative effort can become when everyone involved is both at the top of their game and enthusiastic about the work. This is what makes me think that Better Call Saul is going to be good - it's not like Gilligan struck gold with the idea of "good person does bad things until bad person," he just created a team that could execute it really well, and it looks like Better Call Saul is going to have that same benefit. Civilized Fishbot fucked around with this message at 04:22 on Oct 7, 2013 |
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Oct 7, 2013 04:08
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Rageaholic Monkey posted:Metastasis looks pretty loving bad, though. The actors chosen for the roles don't look distinctive like they do in Breaking Bad, and from the trailer that I saw of it, it looked like the production values had taken a big hit and that this looks to be more of a cheap soap opera than a marvel of cinematography. It's probably better for those Spanish speakers who have never seen Breaking Bad and are looking forward to Metastasis (does anyone actually fall under that category?) to just watch Breaking Bad with Spanish subtitles instead. But maybe it could actually turn out to be alright. Who knows. The trailer and the casting choices make it look like some community theater retelling of Breaking Bad, though. On the other hand it looks like they're copying as much of the cinematography and plot points as possible - if they keep the major lines too, the show can't be that bad by virtue of not having much to fail at while copying a lot of what made the original show great.
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Oct 7, 2013 04:13
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Timeless Appeal posted:So, is "Gray" just a surname for you guys, or is "gray" and "grey" interchangeable? I'm not British  but quick research indicates that "grey" is far more prominently used in Britain just as "gray" is far more prominently used in America. Pictured: British actor Adam Godley, who probably uses "grey." Civilized Fishbot fucked around with this message at 04:32 on Oct 7, 2013 |
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Oct 7, 2013 04:26
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I feel like The Wire shouldn't be evaluated as a TV show so much as some sort of bizarre series of 5 incredibly long movies, because a season of The Wire is so much more valuable than the sum of its parts.
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Oct 7, 2013 05:35
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The Mutato posted:My dad is still convinced Walt is a good guy who did everything for his family and he just said otherwise to placate Skyler Have you asked your dad about Walt turning down the Grey Matter job, which would have given Walt's family incredible financial stability while keeping them from any exposure to crime?
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Oct 7, 2013 06:03
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WickedHate posted:We're not doing this again are we? Fair enough. It's just ludicrous to me that someone could be enthralled enough by a show to watch 50+ hours of it without comprehending the motivations of the main character. freebooter posted:There was a really great article a while ago - can't remember who wrote it or what it was from, it was Grantland or EW or Time or something - which made the case The Wire could also be called a Greek tragedy in its portrayal of flawed people who try to do the right thing, and end up either forced into doing the wrong thing or suffering greatly from defying their assigned roles in life. One can also say that Breaking Bad is about events happening and people changing, while The Wire is just about people and institutions existing in a stagnant deadlock. With me, comparing The Wire and Breaking Bad in terms of quality is just as absurd as comparing Thai and Pizza as Elliot points out in the finale. If I want The Wire, I'll watch The Wire. If I want Breaking Bad, I'll watch Breaking Bad. The two aren't nearly similar enough to compete any more than Baskin-Robbins tries to compete with Indiana University. Civilized Fishbot fucked around with this message at 06:15 on Oct 7, 2013 |
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Oct 7, 2013 06:10
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Shageletic posted:Agree with everyone here regarding the quality of BB, but the finale still doesn't sit quite perfectly with me. I mean as a propulsive exciting piece of TV its pretty much perfect, but it slips away from being the definitive series ending punctuation point that, say, The Shield managed to hit. And I think its to do with themes, really. I think that the ending worked because it was only "winning" by the standards of Heisenberg. Walt's family hates him and has been shamed in the public eye; Walt is remembered as a terrible human being who collaborated with Nazis to sell crystal meth; Grey Matter gets viewed as a benevolent corporation fixing Walt's mistakes. By the standards of 50-year old Walter White, Walt lost. However, Walt also got public and private recognition as the greatest and smartest badass to have ever lived, and he demonstrated that nobody can cross Heisenberg and escape unscathed. By Heisenberg standards, he won. I always viewed the show as an examination of a pretty common emotional urge - "screw these assholes keeping me down from showing how great I can be, I'm going to be the world's greatest badass and not take poo poo from anyone and they're all going to learn how awesome I am when I'm bossing them around and calling the shots and passing around money to the people I like" - and spending 50+ hours demonstrating why that should never ever be anyone's top priority. The final episode ended with Walt totally succeeding in achieving that goal and fulfilling that urge, at the cost of literally everything else in his entire life.
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Oct 7, 2013 16:47
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spacing in vienna posted:With Walter White now being Walter Blanco, they can't keep the Walt Whitman initials as a way of Hank finding out. I'd be curious how they tweak that; is there a famous Mexican poet with initials WB? W. B. Yeats is the most obvious option.
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Oct 7, 2013 23:27
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Vulpes posted:Edit: wait, I forgot something. Disregard. I hope it was related to Irish nationalism. Hopefully that's spanish-Gale's political preoccupation like english-Gale's libertarianism. Maybe spanish-Gale and spanish-Gus are funding the IRA with the meth money. What a wealth of potential. Steve Yun posted:Do people not own RV's in South America? Wouldn't driving a bus around arouse suspicion? Yeah, that was the logic used in changing the vehicle - driving around an RV would seem more suspicious than driving around a school bus.
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Oct 8, 2013 00:12
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Fight Club Sandwich posted:Will danny trejo reprise his role in metastasis? Danny Trejo should play Gus or Gomie or Todd, like how all the actors changed roles between The Corner and The Wire.
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Oct 8, 2013 01:09
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Interstitial Abs posted:If Vince was making Classic Coke, then this is Mr. Pib. I don't want to live in a world without Classic Coke 
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Oct 8, 2013 02:00
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freebooter posted:Why are they even remaking it? It shits me when America remakes foreign series because Americans can't bear (or networks think they can't bear) to watch something that's not 100% what they're comfortable and familiar with. It's just as bad the other way around. There's validity in remaking it, in that it would be cool to watch the show take some of the other directions which were strongly considered such as
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Oct 8, 2013 02:15
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Capntastic posted:They heard about him from that one Narcorrido song, Negro Y Azul Metastasis will replace Negro Y Azul with an American rap ballad titled "Black and Blue." It sounds exactly like Black and Yellow, but longer.
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Oct 8, 2013 02:29
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cletepurcel posted:I think the torture machine and Jesse dying in season 1 were scrapped pretty early. Though there's been conflicting stories on the latter - sometimes the story goes that Gilligan decided against it when he saw how good Aaron Paul was in the early episodes, while others claim the writers' strike was what saved Jesse. Oh, the torture machine and Flynn trying meth are absolutely terrible ideas. I still want to see them brought to film as a comedy "there but for the grace of God go I" viewing experience. The Torture Machine is especially hilarious, because it's supposed to be Walt's means of avoiding killing someone. "I'm squeamish about murdering this man, so I'll just create an elaborate suicide machine while brutally torturing the man every day until he kills himself, and that will certainly be easier for me." I'm not sure that those stories are conflicting. Couldn't it just be that Gilligan saw that Aaron Paul was a good actor, and so scrapped the death when he was thinking about it over the course of the writer's strike? Civilized Fishbot fucked around with this message at 02:38 on Oct 8, 2013 |
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Oct 8, 2013 02:36
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freebooter posted:Haha that's terrible. What's the deal with the blood suitcase and cowboy flashbacks? I never heard of those. Writer Tom Schauz posted:We kept having these long discussions about Walt carrying a suitcase through the desert. There was blood dripping out of it. What was inside? Entertainment Weekly posted:In a series of flashbacks that takes place about 100 years ago — and would feel somewhat structurally similar to season 2′s floating-eyeball pool scenes — we follow the tale of a New Mexico cowboy. “It was going to have all these weird tangential relationships with a different cast scattered throughout the season in these three- to four-minute teasers, and it would all somehow in the end come together in the main story,” says Gould. “Walt would have a showdown at the same spot where this other character had died at the end of those.” Cowboy flashback could have been cool in a Tales of the Black Freighter way.
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Oct 8, 2013 03:47
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Fight Club Sandwich posted:The show was perfect as is and the only thing I'd change would be to have explicit gay sex scenes with Gus the way that there was with Omar or the black guy from the shield That would have been an unacceptable level of sincere passion for Gustavo Fring, robot druglord. I liked that Gus made only one single decision that was driven by anything other than cold profit-based pragmatism, and that he died because of it.
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Oct 8, 2013 03:57
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Walter White was praying to Based God. This is an accepted fact and I don't know how y'all don't understand this 
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Oct 8, 2013 17:05
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Rando posted:I personally thought Heisenberg's last appearance was in Ozymandias. The last two episodes only feature Walt. It was in the New Hampshire cabin on the deer's head. Walt tries to put it on and go outside, and then goes back in.
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Oct 8, 2013 18:05
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Rando posted:Of course the idea that there are two personalities in Walt's head is silly to begin with. Heisenberg and Walter White aren't actually different people, but they are manifestations of Walt's desire to be an amoral coldhearted badass in the workplace and a loving father at home, and his delusion that the two will never interfere with each other.
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Oct 8, 2013 18:26
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Jesse is going to forge a new identity, and accidentally end up working for Saul at Cinnabon.
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Oct 9, 2013 03:27
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Better Call Saul should just have Bryan Cranston directing from time to time, so it gets popular attention without having to have Walt dominate an episode.
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Oct 9, 2013 16:19
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Kasonic posted:I thought Saul only hired Huell partway through the series? This is true. Saul hires Huell after Mike threatens to break Saul's legs. However, Saul and Huell could easily have had some other sort of relationship prior to then.
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Oct 9, 2013 17:18
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Boogaleeboo posted:McGill. His real name is McGill. He picked a Jewish name because the type of people he deals with trust a Jewish lawyer more. According to the podcast, his real first name is Patrick. Which may have just been a joke, but there's no way that his first name is Saul. Although it would be awesome if his name was Miguel McGill.
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Oct 9, 2013 17:31
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Rando posted:Then again, at the time of Mike's first appearance I don't think the writers knew he was going to be an important character. They didn't. Mike's first appearance was just filling a role initially meant for Saul, but Bob Odenkirk was busy.
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Oct 9, 2013 23:39
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Fight Club Sandwich posted:I think Walt is more an allegory for hitler as presented in jesse's "heil hitler bitch" scene. todd is also hitler People who shot themselves:
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Oct 12, 2013 17:50
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Timeless Appeal posted:I think that Hank is genuinely kind of a badass and despite the way he often comes off, he's actually pretty brilliant. What I'm saying is, you're probably no Hank, son, and he barely survived the twins. I like to imagine that Hank, like Dean Norris, has a degree from Harvard College. As well as Marie having a degree from Northwestern University because purple.
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Oct 14, 2013 16:28
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hiddenmovement posted:I'm barely a skinny pete, but for two guys billed as super hitmen they sure got their arses handed to them quite badly by a lone cop. They lost the element of surprise because of outside intervention, and the cop was armed with a vehicle. They still beat the cop to within an inch of his life, and would've had him dead if not for hubristically choosing to go get the axe to kill him. They were also 100% going to kill Walt until Gus called them off. It's pretty clear that they can get just about anything done unless Gus intervenes.
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Oct 14, 2013 17:05
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Network Pesci posted:https://www.savewalterwhite.com was good back when it first came out, but try reading through it now, knowing what you know about how the show turns out. I can't seem to make it all the way through the giant green wall of text, must be all the dust in here. The link to donate used to link to an actual cancer charity, but AMC pulled it down after deciding that the charity was too wasteful.
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Oct 15, 2013 18:16
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Gale's libertarianism is arguably relevant because it solidified Gale as the representation of "we're all going to be rational actors and coexist together and make a lot of money through cooperation and the free market" before Walt had Gale killed by emotionally manipulating a junkie. It underlined that the meth business was unavoidably dangerous and corrupt, not the magical bastion of safe free-market sales which Gale and Walt both claimed it to be.
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Oct 17, 2013 03:50
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PootieTang posted:I took it a little different. In season 1 Walt says that when they're going to sell, he's going to sell a pure high quality product for a reasonable price. But it's not really that sincere, since it's made very clear he chose meth because of the money he saw at the Meth Lab he went on the ride along with. I think that I agree with you. However, I took his "we're going to sell a product that performs as advertised" speech to not even be an insincere attempt to seem kindhearted to addicts, but as an open attempt to distinguish himself as somehow better/more rational than his competitors in the industry. Then he finds a guy who's totally into the line of thought of "we're going to be reasonable businessmen and do well by our business partners and our clients," and has that man violently killed through emotionally manipulating a junkie just like the ones hooked on their product. I agree that Gale was apparently the only person who was genuinely only interested in selling meth to people. Whether that came out of greed or a sense of moral obligation is unclear, especially since libertarianism tends to bind the two together. Gale's death reaffirms that pretty much everyone else is only in the industry so that they can do something that could never be done in a legal industry like murdering competitors/coworkers and demonstrating superiority over the police. Gus was in it so that he could screw over the cartels, Walt was in it so that he could be Heisenberg, Lydia appeared to be in it as a function of her ego as a businesswoman, Jessie was in it because he wanted to feel good at something and have meaning in his life, and Tuco was in it because it meant that he could kill his subordinates freely. Boardwalk Empire does a good job going more in-depth into the idea of analyzing why a person would ever want to go into a dangerous and illegal industry when they have other options, and how money is oftentimes not the biggest factor.
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Oct 17, 2013 06:16
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PootieTang posted:Is the SA party line so ingrained that people really have to say poo poo like 'Gale called himself a libertarian, so he must have been in it because of greed' or 'He was a libertarian, he was therefore also a pedophile'? I mean the creators of BB made it very clear that they didn't pay heed to the politics, that it was purely a story about people, I really doubt Vince Gilligan thought 'I'll have him say he's a libertarian, that way the audience will know that he's actually evil deep down' I don't think that anyone is saying that Gale's libertarianism made him morally flawed or stupid. People are just saying that Gale's libertarianism demonstrated a genuine interest in the free market, entrepreneurship, and uncomplicated business dealings for the enrichment of all - which is portrayed as the noblest motivation anyone could have for joining the business. tbp posted:Especially because the show pretty much never assigned a moral value to making meth I would say that the show started trying to do that with Wendy/showing the awful lives of meth addicts, but then it stopped focusing on those aspects very early on. Civilized Fishbot fucked around with this message at 16:28 on Oct 17, 2013 |
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Oct 17, 2013 16:25
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Skeesix posted:I think that libertarianism is an ideology he's adopted because he couldn't cut it as a regular chemist.  Gale is an incredibly skilled chemist.
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Oct 17, 2013 16:29
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Pomp posted:You guys don't get it. Who are you parodying? Have you read the thread? Nobody has been saying anything like this. Libertarians like free markets between rational actors. So did Gale, and that was the point of his character. Nobody has been offering anything close to the sentiment that you are mocking
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Oct 17, 2013 16:41
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Roland Jones posted:He was a good chemist, but, as he himself said, he couldn't handle the non-chemistry stuff. Couldn't work with (most) people, couldn't handle applications or needing to find money or get approval or whatever. Gale's skills basically amounted to chemistry, and nothing but chemistry, and ironically enough, that's not actually enough to be a chemist. Or, really, a member of nearly any profession. He was a nice enough guy (apart from, you know, making meth), but he didn't understand and couldn't handle the real world. I'll agree with this - I'm sorry to Skeesix if this is what Skeesix meant - I thought that (s)he was saying that Gale was actually bad at chemistry. Pomp posted:Are you really not familiar with the bizarre fear/hate boner that a lot of goons have for pubbies? This is as simple as Reddit has a lot of dumb "libertarians," Reddit has pedophile apologists/pedophiles, so noted libertarian Gale must also be a terrible person. That's all there is to this. People like to otherize, and it's easy to assume anyone in an "other" group fits the bill 100%, especially when others in your peer group are doing it. I didn't see that post - sorry! I think that aside from the posts dedicated entirely to bashing libertarians like thisFishBulb posted:Libertarians are terrible people in reality. It doesn't have to be a goon thing. the discussion has been pretty neutral and even-handed about libertarianism. One could go onto whatever Ron Paul forums or wherever and people would probably say the same things about how Gale represented an innocent and sympathetic desire to participate in the free markets, and how his murder underlined how pretty much nobody enters into the meth business just to sell meth. Civilized Fishbot fucked around with this message at 17:16 on Oct 17, 2013 |
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Oct 17, 2013 17:14
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. That's just where I'm assuming this sentiment of "Gale was a terrible person and a lovely chemist, why else would he be libertarian" is coming from.
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hiddenmovement posted:This is a dreadful discussion. Can we talk about anything else? I always found it interesting that we got flashbacks to Gus's past, because Gus wasn't a main audience POV character like Walt or Jesse. Why did the show offer insight into why Gus hates Hector and the cartels, when the show doesn't otherwise offer insight into why Gus does a lot of what he does?
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Oct 17, 2013 17:24
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Roland Jones posted:Well, Gus' hatred of Hector and the cartel was directly relevant to things, both because it revealed that he wasn't the perfect aloof mastermind he acted like and because it led directly to his death when Walter figured it out. Why he decided to get into the business in the first place, on the other hand, wasn't. Basically, we didn't need to know why he became Chicken King of Meth Mountain, but we did need to know why an angry old guy in a wheelchair would be willing to blow himself up to kill him. I think that if the show had just decided to demonstrate that Gus hates Hector and Hector hates Gus, people would have been okay with that without the need to see the origin of their feud - the same way that people accept that the cartel refused to kill Gus without feeling a burning need to know Gus's origins. Come to think of it, Walt is Hector at the end of the show. He's a weak and lonely man on the verge of death who finds his second wind by going on a suicide mission motivated by spite against rival criminals, using a crazy murder machine built by Walter White and activated by an innocuous button, teaming up with some random young criminal punks to do it.
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Oct 17, 2013 17:32
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tbp posted:They had to show why Gus hated Hector so much. It would have been hollow to see him do all he did at the end of s4 without it. And they did explain why the Cartel wouldn't kill Gus, a few times really... initially because of being the "Generalissimo" in Chile, and then because of his importance to the meth trade in the Southwest USA. They don't explain why the Cartel couldn't kill Gus other than Don Eladio making a mysterious mention of Gus's past. I think that the same could have been done with Hector and Gus - showing the spite between them without fully explaining how it came to be. The question is what was gained out of showing how the spite came to be. Maybe it was to highlight the difference between Walt wanting to be better than ]everyone (although Elliot especially) and Gus just really hating a few dudes.
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Oct 17, 2013 17:59
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