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hanshotfirst1138 wrote: Tue Sep 08, 2020 3:49 pm My new iPhone crops many, many 2.35 movies down fit the phone, and Apple have no answer for me as to why.


Apparently HBO MAX is STILL having a huge fight with Fire and Roku and hasn’t created an app for either yet. As usual, the consumer must suffer. I suppose I should be glad that it even works on Chromecast.


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Your first problem is trying to watch movies on a phone.

hanshotfirst1138 wrote: Tue Sep 08, 2020 3:49 pm My new iPhone crops many, many 2.35 movies down fit the phone, and Apple have no answer for me as to why.

On all of my iphones (I think i'm on my 5th one now), if you double tap the screen, the video crops to fit the screen. Double tap again, it goes back to OAR. I assume you've tried that?

knives wrote:

hanshotfirst1138 wrote: Tue Sep 08, 2020 3:49 pm My new iPhone crops many, many 2.35 movies down fit the phone, and Apple have no answer for me as to why.


Apparently HBO MAX is STILL having a huge fight with Fire and Roku and hasn’t created an app for either yet. As usual, the consumer must suffer. I suppose I should be glad that it even works on Chromecast.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Your first problem is trying to watch movies on a phone.

I’m not trying to watch whole movies on it, but when your job makes you almost suicidally miserable, a few clips on your lunch break at work are nice.


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I used to get HBO MAX through my father-in-law’s Comcast account, but apparently he signed up through Apple TV and now it won’t allow another login. This about as first-world a problem as you can get but it’s still annoying as hell.


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I'm hooked on 70s crime/political thrillers and have seen several competent ones on APrime over the past week: Hennessy (1975, Sharp), The Parallax View (1974, Pakula), 3 Days of the Condor (1975, Pollack), Rogue Male (1976, Donner) and tonight, for the first time, The Boss (1973, Di Leo). The only reference I could find for the Di Leo film on the site was this:

Ovader wrote: Thu Dec 02, 2010 4:33 pm RaroVideo US collects some of his finest work in The Fernando Di Leo Crime Collection, a four-DVD set that includes Di Leo's highly influential "Milieu Trilogy" - Caliber 9 (Milano Calibro 9), The Italian Connection (La Mala Ordina) and The Boss (Il Boss). The set's final disc includes 1976's Rulers of the City, which stars Jack Palance as a mob boss. All four films were digitally restored and remastered in collaboration with the Venice Film Festival. Each is presented with a number of extras, including a documentary about each film. The Fernando Di Leo Crime Collection will arrive on DVD February 22.

The set might be worth an investment. Gotta see The Boss turns out first.

18 selections from Renown Films currently streaming on APrime.

Just came across an ad online for Ovid TV & hadn't heard anything about it. Is anyone familiar with this service? Who is running it, quality of the streaming. I went to the website & noticed some overlap with Kanopy & perhaps Criterion. The website boasts connections to the Maylses Documentary Center, BFI, National Film Board of Canada, Oscilloscope, First Run Features. On browsing titles I see Marlon Riggs, Maya Deren, Chris Marker... Seems to be some overlap with Kanopy, not as much with Criterion. At the moment they have just over 900 titles, but it looks like Kanopy where there's not much turnover. Not sure it's worth $7 a month as I already have plenty to view between Criterion & Kanopy.

Ovid was started by Docuseek, a streaming provider of documentaries for the educational market. The "founding content partners" are Icarus, First Run, Grasshopper, KimStim, Bullfrog Films, Distrib Films US, Women Make Movies, and dGenerate Films. Been meaning to check them out but haven't yet, so I can't say anything about the streaming quality.

Recent Documentaries do seem to be the bulk of the content, however the ad I saw emphasized that it featured international films not easily available in the US & billed the channel as a more intelligent alternative to Netflix. I noticed a few international films: Camille Claudel, Ida, Mesrine pts 1 & 2, however many of these seemed to be also on Kanopy & not part of some rotation scheme like Criterion does, so it looked like I might only want to tune in for a month or 2, but that a year subscription wouldn't be worth it.

ando wrote:I'm hooked on 70s crime/political thrillers and have seen several competent ones on APrime over the past week: Hennessy (1975, Sharp), The Parallax View (1974, Pakula), 3 Days of the Condor (1975, Pollack), Rogue Male (1976, Donner) and tonight, for the first time, The Boss (1973, Di Leo). The only reference I could find for the Di Leo film on the site was this:

Ovader wrote: Thu Dec 02, 2010 4:33 pm RaroVideo US collects some of his finest work in The Fernando Di Leo Crime Collection, a four-DVD set that includes Di Leo's highly influential "Milieu Trilogy" - Caliber 9 (Milano Calibro 9), The Italian Connection (La Mala Ordina) and The Boss (Il Boss). The set's final disc includes 1976's Rulers of the City, which stars Jack Palance as a mob boss. All four films were digitally restored and remastered in collaboration with the Venice Film Festival. Each is presented with a number of extras, including a documentary about each film. The Fernando Di Leo Crime Collection will arrive on DVD February 22.

The set might be worth an investment. Gotta see The Boss turns out first.

There was a whole subgenre of Eurocrime movies which were much like Spaghetti Westerns. Is that the kind of thing he makes?

PeacockTv has all 46 seasons of SNL streaming. To avoid the clunkers I suppose your approach is everything (and I'm not sure how long this free access will last). So I'm starting with Pryor as guest host eps and working my way down the comedian host food chain from there. (Made a false start with James Franco.)

ando wrote: Thu Oct 15, 2020 2:04 am PeacockTv has all 46 seasons of SNL streaming.

I decided to start with the ‘86-‘87 season that introduced the likes of Phil Hartman, Dana Carvey, and Jan Hooks to SNL. It was full of clunkers but every so often one sketch would save the entire episode.

Interesting side note of these PeacockTV SNL episodes. They decided to edit episodes down to 30 minutes in the case of early seasons. So there is that to look forward to.

Blutarsky wrote: Thu Oct 15, 2020 2:23 am
Interesting side note of these PeacockTV SNL episodes. They decided to edit episodes down to 30 minutes in the case of early seasons. So there is that to look forward to.

When they first were added to Peacock the other week, I eyeballed some episode lengths that I remembered (mainly for being cut especially short) and they matched from 7-8 years ago when what are probably the same edits were all on Netflix and Hulu (before disappearing to the failed Seeso for a while). So most, if not all, musical performances have been cut out along with any sketch that used licensed music. The first five seasons are mostly complete though, which matches the DVD releases of those seasons, so they must have cleared the music for streaming rights on those too.

paulm wrote: Thu Oct 15, 2020 2:46 am

Blutarsky wrote: Thu Oct 15, 2020 2:23 am
Interesting side note of these PeacockTV SNL episodes. They decided to edit episodes down to 30 minutes in the case of early seasons. So there is that to look forward to.

When they first were added to Peacock the other week, I eyeballed some episode lengths that I remembered (mainly for being cut especially short) and they matched from 7-8 years ago when what are probably the same edits were all on Netflix and Hulu (before disappearing to the failed Seeso for a while). So most, if not all, musical performances have been cut out along with any sketch that used licensed music. The first five seasons are mostly complete though, which matches the DVD releases of those seasons, so they must have cleared the music for streaming rights on those too.

That sucks. I binge-watched the '80s during a Hulu trial years ago (I skipped seasons 1-5 as I had already gone through the DVD sets), and I was disappointed by the cuts. FWIW, the first four seasons are still the best (though season 1 was essentially the Chevy Chase show, just as season 5 was nearly the Bill Murray show). 1980-1981 is fascinating towards the end when you watch the show rapidly crumble following Rocket's cursing. Eddie Murphy is ridiculously good, still their best cast member, and he carried the show with Piscopo as his able foil. The final Ebersol year is strange, with established stars taking over and saving most of their best work for filmed sketches (unusual at the time). Lorne Michaels's first season back is stunning for how awful most of it was despite an incredibly talented cast. (I think they have by far the most acting Oscar nominations to date with five.) The show was actually cancelled for like five minutes - NBC's president made the call, told his wife, and she told him it was a mistake because what else can you program at 11:30pm EST on Saturday? He immediately realized she was right. (It had been previously old re-runs of Carson who accidentally created an opening for SNL when he demanded that NBC stop re-running his show on Saturdays to free up episodes that can be re-broadcast during his many vacations.) The show got a second chance, and the new cast + 3 key holdovers probably has the best chemistry of any outside of the original. It says a lot that except for Hartman (who had the best success out of all of them outside of SNL), none of them ever equalled what they accomplished on the show. It's amazing just to see Dennis Miller work single-handedly and confidently as their best anchor.

hearthesilence wrote: Thu Oct 15, 2020 7:11 am It says a lot that except for Hartman (who had the best success out of all of them outside of SNL), none of them ever equalled what they accomplished on the show. It's amazing just to see Dennis Miller work single-handedly and confidently as their best anchor.

As a teenager, I was fortunate enough to grow up with Phil Hartman as Troy McClure and Lionel Hutz, as well as a smattering of other Simpsons characters (...Monorail?). When I got into college, my roommate had stacks of SNL episodes from the late 80s and early 90s. I can’t help but attribute them to why I took five years for my bachelor’s.
Of all those episodes, I distinctly remember sketches in which Phil was lead for being some of the funniest bits of television I have seen. Some of it is definitely dated, but others truly show why he went on to greater successes than others. His delivery and immersion into the material is beyond outstanding.

Blutarsky wrote: Thu Oct 15, 2020 7:31 am As a teenager, I was fortunate enough to grow up with Phil Hartman as Troy McClure and Lionel Hutz, as well as a smattering of other Simpsons characters (...Monorail?). When I got into college, my roommate had stacks of SNL episodes from the late 80s and early 90s. I can’t help but attribute them to why I took five years for my bachelor’s.
Of all those episodes, I distinctly remember sketches in which Phil was lead for being some of the funniest bits of television I have seen. Some of it is definitely dated, but others truly show why he went on to greater successes than others. His delivery and immersion into the material is beyond outstanding.

Absolutely. I think he was actually underrated at the start because Jon Lovitz and especially Dana Carvey had the flashiest, best known roles and became very popular very quickly. (Hartman had Reagan, and the Iran-Contra mastermind sketch is possibly the greatest SNL sketch of that run, but his impression didn't catch on like Carvey's Bush or his own Clinton - it's possible Reagan impressions were already done too often by 1986 to really catch on with the public.) It's pretty amazing to watch the first appearance of, say, Tommy Flanagan or the Church Lady win over the audience so thoroughly that they soon came back over and over again to immediate applause. Hartman didn't have anything like that, and it's easy to see why he nearly left after Lovitz, Hooks and others did - after five years, no cast member would have reasonably expected to become bigger. (Past cast members from the early '80s learned the hard way that Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo moving on didn't mean they'd get more opportunities - Ebersol just pulled a George Steinbrenner move and hired big stars from Spinal Tap and SCTV.) Apparently Michaels talked him into staying because he said it WOULD lift his profile, and with Bill Clinton happening in 1992, he was right.

Even before Clinton, you can see his full potential clearly with the benefit of hindsight, but the cast members knew and called him "the glue." He was so versatile and so comfortable in virtually anything, it's almost insulting to call him a "utility player" because he was so good in every role and not just useful. I put him with Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Jan Hooks, Darrell Hammond, etc. in that way, but none of them could match him in small or throwaway roles - especially in later years, he'd find something absolutely hilarious to do. (My favorite was his brief role as a pseudo-scientist for a Cher infomercial, where his character ineptly mangles the word "environment.")

DarkImbecile wrote: Wed Oct 21, 2020 8:17 pm Millions around the world wail in grief and rend their garments

It's awful that 200+ core employees will be out of jobs, but my god was this company built on a horrible temperature reading
of the marketplace. Its launch was comically terrible, and none of the A-list creators' shows ever debuted. Meg Whitman is
utterly incompetent, and Katzenberg thinks he's an artist, but he has no creative vision whatsoever.

Murder House Flip just couldn't help them weather the rough times!

DarkImbecile wrote: Wed Oct 21, 2020 8:17 pm Millions around the world wail in grief and rend their garments

Have no fear, Biden's team is vetting the CEO of Quibi for a potential cabinet position!

Okay, time for Grandpa Domino Harvey to once again ask for recommendations on good streaming programming from HBO Max now that AMEX cut me a sweet deal on membership

This is nothing I haven't said before, and it's only an HBO exclusive as opposed to a MAX exclusive (although there isn't any physical release of it...) but I should reiterate Euphoria is one of my favorite series/filmed works in some time and would make my early 2010s list if I could even remotely muster an argument for its eligibility.

The Leftovers is my pick. After stumbling briefly to find its footing, it transformed into one of the most profound, broad, and inclusively mature takes on man's relationship with spirituality, and all in a concise 28 episode series. Also, apparently they have Moral Orel, which is something...

I'll tell you the same thing I would tell any other grandpa: The Deuce is prime David Simon

Succession is the best thing on TV

domino harvey wrote: Wed Nov 18, 2020 3:04 am Okay, time for Grandpa Domino Harvey to once again ask for recommendations on good streaming programming from HBO Max now that AMEX cut me a sweet deal on membership

There's a huge amount of Alan Partridge content (but no The Day Today, alas). Stath Lets Flats. I May Destroy You. The Flintstones (the original series).