Charlie Brooker's BLACK MIRROR

This has been picked up by Netflix for a 12-episode third season, going into production later this year.
 
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SERIOUSLY. CANNOT WAIT.
 
I've always had a thing for Charlie Brooker or rather I did until I looked at recent pictures and realised that I preferred him when he was fat and lonely :horny:
 
I never got past the pig episode, everyone seems to be raving about this and I want to give it another try.
 
I really love a lot of Black Mirror, but sometimes his obvious hispter desires come through.
 
Watched the first one. Really enjoyed it and it was the best performance I've ever seen from Bryce Dallas Howard. Spot on - got the combination of comedy and pathos just right.
 
Watched the first 2. Nosedive and Playtest. The general consensus from reviews I've read is that Playtest is better than Nosedive, but I thought Nosedive was a far stronger piece of fiction. Playtest didn't seem to have as much of a point to it as I expected - I was expecting it all to come together at the end with some big grandiose statement, but it didn't deliver. Nosedive might have been obvious, but it was pure satire and very well written.
 
Playtest was horrific viewing! I guess the dangers of AI, if we're gonna summarise.
 
I found Playtest all a bit American Horror Story-lite, and far less scary.

The third episode 'Shut Up And Dance' is the darkest of the three so far and worked really well though
it really is a 100% retread of White Bear. Which is both good and bad... White Bear is one of the best episodes ever - but this has exactly the same point to it and exactly the same twist in essence. I thought the scene with the little girl in the restaurant at the beginning gave the game away a little bit too much though...
- it was probably my favourite of Season 3 so far though despite that.
 
As there is no story to follow I chose to watch Episode 6 yesterday and it is very good too.
 
I watched the third one yesterday with one of Robson & Jerome and it was fucking grim viewing too. Brilliant of course.
 
Watched Nosedive last night. Just incredible television. Bryce Dallas Howard will never not be a queen :disco:

And written by Rashida Jones! :disco:

Can't wait for the next one, shall not be binge watching because it's JUST TOO FUCKING MUCH.
 
Bryce Dallas Howard will never not be a queen :disco:
She was really familiar to me (as is almost everyone in this series - I love the casting), but her filmography adds nothing to these claims.

I just found out, the boy in three played young Alan Turing in Imitation Game. So THERE.
 
I've watched Nosedive and San Junipero. The former had a very pleasing #aesthetic. As did the latter, but more importantly it destroyed me emotionally.

She was really familiar to me (as is almost everyone in this series - I love the casting), but her filmography adds nothing to these claims.

Even if you've not seen it, Jurassic World's promotion was unavoidable, so maybe you recognize her from that.
 
Watched the first two last night. Nosedive was everything I expect from the series, obvious commentary on our fickle ideals of online popularity, set beautifully and acted perfectly.

I enjoyed playtest for a lot of reasons, I thought the scary aspect was ace, but then I was pretty stoned. However like cwej I felt it just didn't come together at the end. I thought they could have made more of the recurring aspect, it kind of reminded me of when on acid things start to go wrong and you question your own stability, and you get stuck in thought loops. The end just felt a bit meh.

Was really tempted to watch another but trying not to binge on them as theres so much to absorb.
 
Episode 5 was my least fave for obvious reasons. 6 was ridiculous but a really compelling bit of TV. You can tell this is Brooker making TV with the budget he always wanted. So much glossier and bigger than the first two series.
 
I thought that about nosedive, it was shot beautifully. I'm really glad it didn't go shit.

Reckon hes got a film in him?
 
Easy! The last one is 90 minutes so yeah. I bet he still has a million warped ideas bubbling away.
 
I LOVED all the Edge cameos in Playtest!

My own AR nightmare would be having to watch his Tinder hookup in her starring role as Viva in West End extravaganza Viva Forever on a perpetual loop.

The guy in it is Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn's son!
 
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Nosedive - loved the acting in this, and the desperation from the lead. I'll do anything for a Like too. For once this show gave me an ending that actually made me smile - that scene in the prison was welcome liberation after watching a Stepford world for 45 minutes.

Playtest - I predicted that his mum ringing while he had that headset on was BAD NEWS in the middle of the episode, but then I forgot about it. I thought parts of it were actually a little boring; I think they could have gone further with the scare tactics than just a spider and a muted ghost. He really should have just asked his mum for the money really.

Shut and Dance - Jesus Christ. I watched this late last night and it stayed with me today. I think what shocked me most is that I thought the lead was just too young himself to be a paedophile - you always imagine dirty old men - but then it explained how he was willing to go to the ends of the earth to keep his secret from coming out. When it got to the point of the bank robbery I was thinking 'God, just let them show the video then Jesus'.
I didn't really buy that Robson Green's character would go through all that just to hide that he had been chatting to a prostitute - if he'd been a little shrewd maybe he could have pretended it was a present for his wife :D But yeah, a great episode that shocked and kept the suspense up the whole way through, just like "White Bear." I read a review that said the worst part was when the PTA mum was in their car because it dropped the suspense, but I totally disagree. That was PAINFUL to watch because you knew what kind of pressure they were under.

The lesbian San Paolo one - I actually watched this first and was underwhelmed, but if I had seen it after "Shut Up and Dance" I would have very much welcomed the happy vibes.
 
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I'm still haunted by Shut Up & Dance after watching it last night.

I couldn't breathe through it all, was rooting for him throughout then there's THAT twist. I'm so conflicted. Just horrible.

I HATE THIS SHOW YET LOVE IT.
 
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I've got such a love/hate relationship with Black Mirror. This article sort of sums up how I feel about it. I actively don't enjoy it but am kind of in awe of it at the same time.

I've not seen any of the Netflix series yet though, and I'm nervously looking forward to it.

http://www.vulture.com/2016/10/black-mirror-the-case-against-it.html

I do not like Black Mirror. I’m going to lay out some reasons why that is, and try to give a deeper explanation for exactly why it turns me off so aggressively, but ultimately my dislike comes down to a point of taste. It’s a show rooted in a specific, intensely cynical perspective, it tends to use surprise like a cudgel, and it seems to delight in combining those two things. “Aha!” Black Mirror is constantly saying. “I got you! Humanity is actually much worse than you thought!” And really, either you enjoy that experience, or you don’t.

There are lots of reasons to love the series, which returns for a third season on Netflix today, chief among them being that it is really good at what it sets out to do. The world it imagines in each Twilight Zone–style stand-alone episode always begins with one set of rules, and then slowly peels away the resulting implications for humanity, layer by depressing layer. It operates on horrifying, too-plausible nightmare logic, tending to lean on literalizations of some strange minor quirk of a science-fiction premise, and following that quirk through inevitable, ghastly escalations. The resulting twists are simultaneously shocking and immediately recognizable. Of course she would then order the zombie body to go along with the social-media re-creation of her dead boyfriend. Of course the prime minister is going to end up actually committing bestiality with a pig.

The thing is, for all its conceptual complexity — for all of the surprise twists and third-act reversals, for all of the high-concept premises and alarming escalations, Black Mirror’s messages are usually pretty simple. Cell phones? Bad. Reality shows? Bad. Social media? Really bad. Politics as entertainment? Definitely bad, but not ultimately as disturbing as entertainment-style justice. Oh, sure, the setup and the execution of those ideas is impressive, but the show’s primary crutch is too often that it uses thought-provoking and fascinating foundations in order to reach the simplest, most alarmist possible conclusion about a variety of technological innovations.

Take “The Waldo Moment,” a season-two episode with some marked echoes of our current political landscape. In it, a comedian who voices and controls a vulgar animated bear ends up running in a local election as a stunt. He ends up detonating the political discourse, driving the electorate toward entertainment rather than real engagement with issues, and ultimately Waldo takes over the world as a global political brand selling an anodyne, featureless message of change. Two-thirds of the way through the episode, you realize that Waldo will grow bigger than our comedian protagonist, and things will not turn out well for the world. And then, that happens.

There are a couple problems here. The first is that now we’ve seen the reality of this play out, it doesn’t feel quite so revelatory. “The Waldo Moment” looks like a fairly utopian vision of what political discourse could sound like compared to the contemporary real-world offerings. But the second and more widespread issue with Black Mirror as a whole is that “The Waldo Moment” follows a pattern that informs nearly all of its installments. You begin in one place, half- to two-thirds of the way through, you get either a twist or an unexpected escalation, and then, yep, that thing you suspected was not good at the start, ends up being really, extra not good by the end. Once you’ve seen more than one or two episodes, you know the third-act revelation is coming. You examine the first part for clues about what it might be, and then, to its credit, Black Mirror usually finds a way to make that surprise even more upsetting than you were imagining.

Black Mirror relies on the illusion of depth. Its one-two punch structure is all about bombshells and astonishing disclosures, and it’s a format that capitalizes on the audience feeling they’ve discovered something important. When you follow Black Mirror through the wormhole, you also feel like you’ve come out the other side. You’ve learned something worthwhile. The truth of things — which is usually some version of how technology has perverted humanity — is hidden, and by the end, you get to see behind the veil.

But that depth is not actually all that deep. The things Black Mirror uncovers about the nature of people and technology are pessimistic visions of humankind, and they’re also remarkably absent of nuance. Guess what: Reality shows are dehumanizing. Social media makes people say and do horrible things. Documenting every single moment of our lives has downsides. It’s like stepping through the wardrobe into C.S. Lewis’s Narnia, but instead of a magical land full of fauns and evil queens and talking beavers, there’s just a note that reads, “This is an allegory about Jesus.”

In part, that’s just the nature of cynicism, which notoriously punches holes in things without offering much in the way of solutions. And in the few moments when Black Mirror escapes a default stance of scorn, its vision of the future can be more interesting. It may be notable that this happens most frequently when the show contemplates death, as in the second season’s “Be Right Back” or the new Netflix season’s most interesting episode, “San Junipero.” Maybe death is still such a frightening, baffling, human, cynicism-flummoxing phenomenon that even Black Mirror is forced to take a more thoughtful and even optimistic perspective of what the future could hold.

Those moments, though, are few and far between. In general, Black Mirror’s box of magic tricks is just that — a set of admittedly impressive narrative tricks that don’t result in much of substance.

And the nature of Black Mirror’s vision of the future is that it can also feel like a cop-out. Its very simplicity — cell phones = bad! — is so misaligned with the much more complicated, multifaceted role technology plays in our world that we are almost let off the hook. We’re excused from the consequences of deep thoughtfulness about what role we give technology because Black Mirror already leapt to a conclusion. Social media is bad! I got it! It is bad! But it’s also here, in our politics and our commerce and our daily lives, doing horrible things and decent things and neutral things all at once.

Yes, this is still ultimately a matter of taste. All fiction is basically narrative magic trickery, and the bottom line is that Black Mirror’s brand of magic is distinctly not my preference. It’s especially tough to take in the midst of a year where it’s not much of a surprise twist for the world to be worse than you thought. Even without that element, though, it’s too easy to imagine what the Black Mirror episode about a more popular, viral version of itself would look like. We’d become glued to a fictional account of a near-future horror, dazzled by its audacity and sharpness, and we’d be so entranced by it that we would fail to notice its superficiality. We’d tweet about it. Maybe when we picked up our phones or used a trending hashtag, we would get a tiny jolt of depression, remembering the dark prospect Black Mirror foretold. But nothing about our behavior would ultimately change — we’d just left with the tiny jolt of depression, and another episode of Black Mirror.
 
Evil internet age DP of doom foretelling the end of humanity.
 
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I agree with the article - I enjoy watching it for the thrill-seeking, but it doesn't actually make me feel good after. It certainly does make me THINK however, and I guess that's why I keep coming back to it.
 
I love it.

However, Episode 5 was really predictable and didn't engage me as much as the rest.
I guessed where it was going the second we first saw the Roaches.
 
Loved Episode 6. It was like if
Moopy's Cunt of the Week had some actual effect at the end of every week...

It kind of felt a bit like modern Who or even Torchwood rather than Black Mirror. A great way to end the series!
 

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