Thank you for answering that content question! I watched The Menu last night and it was excellent - not all all what I was expecting! Very dark, very biting!
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Back for a third season!
It looks like Tricia Black is back as hard-ass Tara Swallows. She’s fun.
Also, does anyone have something to say about Run the 'Burbs? I like Andrew Phung and I’m wondering if it’s worth watching.
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Also, Bridgett Everett should be back right about now. The second episode is scheduled for January 13, but I haven’t seen that the first episode has been released. 
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Groovy; I was just about out of stuff to watch.
Thanks.
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Will it be good? Who can say?
As a counterbalance to that I found it toothless, and dull. It was neither funny nor frightening. It took an age to get the pieces set up. I felt that someone saw the success of boiling point and white lotus and said “let’s stick them together! And everything’s horror these days!”
Fiennes had fun chewing the scenery and Nicholas Hoult was wonderfully hateable, his gormless adoration really enticed you to punch the telly. But that’s about it.
Boiling Point is great btw.
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I will have to check out Boiling Point. I have not seen it or White Lotus, so that might have made me enjoy The Menu more.
I was getting horror vibes from the marketing, which might have had more to do with my previously mentioned horror of cannibalism - once that was removed I had no horror vibes at all from the film
I ended up enjoying it very much for the satire and for what it says about how your clientele can rob you of the pleasure of your work and how a simple thing can restore some of that…but it is not enough.
Of course, I will also watch anything with Nicholas Hoult in it and say it is the best thing ever made, so I cannot be trusted
ETA: Another thing that really does stick with me from it is the strange interaction of Margot being a sex worker and Slowik being a chef - both service jobs with generally awful clients. Her faking and over-exaggerating her pleasure at eating the cheeseburger is really doing a lot of work, as does his reaction to it. 5 stars
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First you need to roll for INT saves against illusions.
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Well, that gets modified by the CHR of the lead actors, of course
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That’s fair enough. Other movies have done it better and with greater subtlety.
The scene with the Coast Guard officer turning out to be one of them has been done to death.
I think that The Menu was fun for its utterly believable absurdity in the same way that The Killing of a Sacred Deer was. Sometimes, that kind of movie just scratches an itch in a way that is satisfying.
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Looking forward to it. It’s amazing that such a quiet, low-key show ever got made, let alone renewed.
Succession season 4 is coming back in the spring, and rumour has it The Righteous Gemstones season 3 will air around the same time. It’s as if the same basic concept was pitched to two different teams.
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I finally got around to it, and I kinda agree, and yeah, if they’re going to enter those political arenas, why make the protagonist a woman, when the problem in our ongoing not yet smashed patriarchy is men!
At first I thought Lydia was being portrayed as a predatory monster, a sort of genteel Weinstein, but afterward, i realized that we never actually see her do anything of that sort. It’s plausible to think she may not be a monster at all, and the real one is actually her assistant, who sends her anonymous things with crypticdrawings on them, maybe to get her own revenge.
I did think though that the leftish stance on identity gets unfairly caricatured early on, with that dude who wants to defenestrate Bach’s music because he was an asshole.
Edit:
Good points made about that character here:
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I’m not sure if I mentioned this one before, but Aubrey Plaza is good in this one as the anti-hero, and the chemistry between her and Theo Rossi is good. The ending is rather predictable, but it’s good mainly for the performances.
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They did! While it definitely wasn’t perfect, they still managed a satisfying conclusion to the tale and left room for more.
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Agreed. That was a really good (no, not excellent, but really good) conclusion to a first season and left me wanting more. I like that!
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Has this one been mentioned?
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I actually didn’t know her until I saw a movie starring her the other year.
If you like movies about movies within movies like I do, she’s great in this. I really enjoyed it.
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Definitely the most bizarrely fractal thing I have ever seen.
I also am a huge fan of The Player (and have always loved that it gave us a fake Bruce Willis/Julia Roberts movie in the movie, sparing is one irl)
@robertmckenna if you have not seen the TV show Legion she is great in it - it is a weird, but great show. Technically an X-Men show, though they never use the term or connect to any other Marvel/MCU stuff, making it into a strange, psychedelic one-off with some incredible performances. And of course her breakout role in Parks and Rec, though I’m not sure how it translates outside of America, since so much of it is focused on the strangeness of American local government
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