Amazon Prime Film/TV Series Recommendations

den87

Damages, The Shield and The Americans all seem to be leaving at the end of the month. All are FX shows so i presume they will end up on Star at some stage.

whatever76

den87 wrote: »

Damages, The Shield and The Americans all seem to be leaving at the end of the month. All are FX shows so i presume they will end up on Star at some stage.

Well recommend the Americans !!!

The Raging Bile Duct

Watched Escape from Pretoria the other night. Apart from Daniel Radcliffe's dodgy South African accent, it's a really decent watch. Doesn't engage with the Apartheid end of the story beyond a very superficial level but there's lots of tension throughout that keeps you on the edge of your seat.

You're a political prisoner, Harry!

howamidifferent

6 Below, for anyone interested in the mountains, the great outdoors , mountaineering dramas, superb watch.

Terence Rattigan

Really enjoyed The Looming Tower, knowing the ending might put some people off, but a fascinating insight into how we got there. Jeff Daniels is great

Lucas Hood

The Raging Bile Duct wrote: »

Watched Escape from Pretoria the other night. Apart from Daniel Radcliffe's dodgy South African accent, it's a really decent watch. Doesn't engage with the Apartheid end of the story beyond a very superficial level but there's lots of tension throughout that keeps you on the edge of your seat.

You're a political prisoner, Harry!

I enjoyed it. Never heard about the story before.

TICKLE_ME_ELMO

Peninsula added today. It's a sequel, I think, to Train to Busan.

johnny_ultimate

TICKLE_ME_ELMO wrote: »

Peninsula added today. It's a sequel, I think, to Train to Busan.

It’s a sort of ‘spiritual successor’ set in the same universe.

It’s also sort of not very good And I thought the first one was a blast.

Mr.Nice Guy

I watched Collateral, having never seen it before. Really enjoyed it. The story took some nice turns that I didn't expect. Great performance from Jamie Foxx.

Wrongway1985

Selection of new titles/re-adds in the last week or so

1944
20th Century Women
An American Tail
Attack of the Puppet People
Batteries not Included
Bellissima
Berlin, I love You
Black Book
The Big Country (G.Peck/C.Heston)
The Bounty Hunter (Aniston/G.Butler)
Braid
Call Me by Your Name
Chappaquiddick (J.Clarke/K.Mara/E.Helms)
Child's Play (1988)
Colette
Crisis Point
Crypto
Death Goes to School
Della (J.Crawford)
Dog Eat Dog (Cage/Dafoe)
Feedback
Flight of the Navigator
Fluke
Get Hard
The Great Debaters (D.Washington/F.Whitaker)
Heathers (Ryder/C.Slater/S.Doherty)
Hellraiser
How to be Single
Horror Express (C.Lee/Cushing)
The Invisible Boy (Original Title: Il ragazzo invisibile)
Ironclad
J.T. LeRoy
Jungle
The Killer Elite (J.Caan/R.Duvall)
The Last Man on Earth (V.Price)
Made in Italy (L.Neeson)(Amazon Original)(2021)
Mean Girls (Lohan/McAdams/Seyfried)
Mean Girls 2
Momentum
Money Plane (2020)
No Country for Old Men
The Notebook
Papillon (Hunnam/Malek)(2017)
Peninsula (2020)
Pond Life
Pork Chop Hill (G.Peck)
The Rite (A.Hopkins)
Robot Overlords
Rumor Has It...
Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon
Short Circuit
Song for a Raggy Boy
Soul Men (S.L.Jackson/Bernie Mac)
The Spiderwick Chronicles
Super Mario Bros.
This Is Where I Leave You
The Vikings (K.Douglas)
The War with Grandpa (De Niro/Thurman)(2020)

East West 101 (Season 1-3)
Invincible (Amazon Original)(Season 1)(2021) - Initial 3 episodes to view (more to follow weekly until conclusion)
La templanza (:The Vineyard)(Amazon Original)(Season 1)(2021)
Shadows over Balkans (Original Title: Senke nad Balkanom)(2017)(Season 1)

Expiring soon(That I'm aware of)

Eddie the Eagle - 1/4

Thelonious Monk

Cold War is on Prime, if you haven't seen it it's really good, my favourite film of recent years. Never knew Polish people could be so cool.

marklazarcovic

Is there any list of prime shows that can be watched here? Not geo blocked

The Raging Bile Duct

marklazarcovic wrote: »

Is there any list of prime shows that can be watched here? Not geo blocked

Justwatch.com is the site I use.

Pen Rua

Last night's viewing was Dark Waters (2019), a movie about the class action lawsuit taken by Robert Bilott against DuPont chemical company for its use of the original chemical used in Teflon. It stars Mark Ruffalo, Bill Camp (who was phenomenal) & co-starring Anne Hathaway and Tim Robins.

The movie tells a very interesting story, and carefully balances the story with the legal work and the discovery process. My wife studied law, is from the US and now works at a legal firm so this is a bit of "her" world, and I work in professional services so it's a touch of "my world" so perhaps out experience heightened our enjoyment of the film.

Camp plays a blinder, as a rural farmer who's farm is decimated by the chemical run off from the factory. Ruffalo was good, and Hathaway hangs around in the background.

Wikipedia describes it as a "legal thriller" and I would agree. Throughout the movie, I didn't know how it would be resolved.

Of course, there's the activist element to it too. From reading up afterwards, it seems Ruffalo was / is going down an activist route after working on this film. A video on YouTube shows him testifying before Congress.

There is the "big corporates are terrible" theme hanging over it, but I doubt many will disagree with that.

Overall, we would give it 9/10. A really good film, with a strong performance from Camp in particular. If you're in the legal / professional world it might be something for your in particular.

Watching Animal Kingdom....fantastic stuff. Its like a TV series from the perspective of the thieves in Point Break.

Pen Rua

Continuing on our based on true story kick, Zero Dark Thirty (2012) was up last night.

This seems like a very popular movie, so my synopsis is short: we follow the US' manhunt for bin Laden post 9/11.

Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke & Joel Edgerton are billed as our stars, with other cast members including Chris Pratt (which took me out of the movie a little - since I'm used to him in goofy roles).

The opening scene is quite amazing. The director (Kathryn Bigelow) just plays audio from distressed phone calls from 9/11. No pictures, not much context other than the date - and you could picture it all on the blank screen. However, I am troubled to read that the audio was used without the express permission of the families of the deceased. Indeed, one family specifically asked for the filmmakers to apologize & make a donation to a charity on their behalf, but this was ignored.

Chastain played an interesting character, who begins pretty horrified by the US' torture operations. Clarke plays to his bad guy strengths.

The film is long - well over 2.5 hours. We jump from Pakistan to London to USA, back to Pakistan... it was hard to keep up. Constant flashes of names of places and "chapters" were not helpful. It would flash up names of places, or just a couple of words, without reason (to me). The apparent use of chapters was unneeded.

Torture is used a lot and these scenes were hard to watch. Reading some of the reaction, there was clear issues with the extent to which torture is used in the film & over egging its effectiveness.

The final scene was very hard to watch. Not in a gore sense, but it was just so blooming dark!

Overall, I was let down by this film. It is a good war-type flick, with some intense action scenes but it just dragged, in my opinion. When it finished, I was just happy to go to bed, unlike Dark Waters (see a couple of posts up) where we went on to YouTube to find out the real guy etc.

This is by no means a bad movie. It is well shot and well acted. It is, to me, unwieldy in its scope. Its use of torture and particularly its unauthorized use of phone calls from the deceased of 9/11 are a let down. Overall, for me, it's 6/10 and not something I would run to re-watch.

KilOit

Deleted User wrote: »

Watching Animal Kingdom....fantastic stuff. Its like a TV series from the perspective of the thieves in Point Break.

No idea this was a tv show as well, loved the film

Captain Red Beard

KilOit wrote: »

No idea this was a tv show as well, loved the film

The film is a lot better. The series being set in America loses the grittiness of the Australian original.

Full_Circle_81

[Deleted User] wrote: »

Watching Animal Kingdom....fantastic stuff. Its like a TV series from the perspective of the thieves in Point Break.

It's really good, but can't understand why it's taking so long for Amazon to add the next season (seasons).....

Sugarlumps

Ellen Barkin is especially unnerving in Animal Kingdom.

Mr.Nice Guy

I watched Aquaman. Despite being two and a half hours or so, I came away from it feeling I didn't really know the main character, besides that he loves his dad.

Superman deals with the Krypton back story much better than this movie managed with Atlantis. It feels like they tried to cram in so much information about the world and kingdoms that they forgot about the characters. I think the Black Manta arc could have been left out of this as well.

I liked Momoa as the lead and the back and forth with Amber Heard. I would have enjoyed seeing more of that. The CGI at the end was far too much for my taste too. The humour isn't there, even though Momoa tries his best.

I'd give it a 5/10 overall.

brevity

Started watching NOS4A2. Three episodes in, not sure what to make of it really...

pixelburp

Mr.Nice Guy wrote: »

I watched Aquaman. Despite being two and a half hours or so, I came away from it feeling I didn't really know the main character, besides that he loves his dad.

Superman deals with the Krypton back story much better than this movie managed with Atlantis. It feels like they tried to cram in so much information about the world and kingdoms that they forgot about the characters. I think the Black Manta arc could have been left out of this as well.

I liked Momoa as the lead and the back and forth with Amber Heard. I would have enjoyed seeing more of that. The CGI at the end was far too much for my taste too. The humour isn't there, even though Momoa tries his best.

I'd give it a 5/10 overall.

The way every dialogue/exposition scene was punctuated with a sudden explosion became an especially hilarious eccentricity of the film. Can remember very little apart from that (beyond an admittedly effective horror scene on a boat at night), and still makes me chuckle. Really spoke to a clue the director presumed its audience were idiots.

Full_Circle_81

brevity wrote: »

Started watching NOS4A2. Three episodes in, not sure what to make of it really...

I really wanted to like it, but gave up after a handful of episodes. I'll eventually get around to reading the book.

OhDazoona

I can thoroughly recommend Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus series which is available on UK TV Play. Gritty, real, believable and not gory.

Mehaffey1

OhDazoona wrote: »

I can thoroughly recommend Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus series which is available on UK TV Play. Gritty, real, believable and not gory.

Loved the show and the books are great as well. Shame they won't be making anymore, John Stott hardly seemed like he was acting as he played the role of Rebus so well.

Pen Rua

We are after finishing The Night Manager, a series aired on BBC in 2016.

We have a stared studded cast of Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie and Olivia Coleman (who happened to be pregnant during filming, so they had to work that into the plot!). Other cast include Coleman's The Crown co-star Tobias Menzies, David Harewood (of Homeland) & the stunning Elizabeth Debicki.

Laurie plays a corrupt businessman involved in arms trading. Coleman heads up a tiny enforcement agency, and has a long history of trying to track down Laurie. Hiddleston comes into play as an agent for Coleman, and away we go. Curiously, Debicki plays a very similar role to Tenant - the partner to the bad guy. There are a lot of parallels if you've seen both.

6 episodes is just right in my opinion. Indeed, it could have been tighter and just have been 5. Interestingly, some comments I read after said it could have done with 10! The pacing is relatively even, with tension constantly rising and falling as we go.

Laurie was good at playing the baddie, which is a role I've not seen him in before. Hiddleston was good, but one could comment his performance is a little single tone at times - a smoldering smile to ween his way out of a problem. Coleman is solid.

Now, there are some discrepancies and weaknesses in the story, but I would suggest that could be down to it being a TV show adapted from a book. While the general consensus on the adaptation seems positive, there does seem to be an equal consensus that the end is quite different.

Overall, this is a solid watch. 6 hours of television is a good length for something to watch in-between a more meatier series.

jill_valentine

I found Night Manager weird because it wanted me to be interested in all the tall beautiful people drinking wine fearfully, but I found myself much more compelled by the pen pushers back home in the ****ty office trying to negotiate the bureaucracy network to get something done in time.

I am desperately afraid that might be a product of encroaching middle age rather than the show though.

Pen Rua

jill_valentine wrote: »

I found Night Manager weird because it wanted me to be interested in all the tall beautiful people drinking wine fearfully, but I found myself much more compelled by the pen pushers back home in the ****ty office trying to negotiate the bureaucracy network to get something done in time.

I am desperately afraid that might be a product of encroaching middle age rather than the show though.

I suppose in that sense, we could have done with snipping an episode and moving that time to those characters - agreed. We got very little screen time with all of them.

Mickeroo

Hadn't realised this was going straight to amazon, supposed to be out later this week:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WJSjln30BQ