Plan B Forum

Chance

This is the second Hulu original production I've seen recently that is top-of-the-line high quality (the other one is 11.22.63 that we watched earlier this year)

It's a well crafted, well cast, well directed psychological/thriller that has such a Hitchcock quality to it that it borders on being an homage to Hitch...(It's so good in this respect that I can imagine Hitchcock watching this and saying, "I wish I'd made that"...)

The mysterious, blonde "woman in distress" who is not quite what she seems to be...

And the well meaning "average guy" who is attracted to her and is gradually drawn in to a world that becomes more and more dangerous and unhinged...

I could easily see Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak playing the leads in Chance if Hitchcock had made this himself 60 years ago....(and oh yes....it's also set in San Francisco...)

But in this version The Well Meaning Average Guy is played brilliantly by Hugh Laurie, and The Mysterious Woman In Distress is also brilliantly portrayed by the fairly unknown actress Gretchen Mol...



It's gotten an 8.2 rating on IMDB:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5620076/

Lord Jim Bob says check it out...

Lord Jim wrote:... and The Mysterious Woman In Distress is also brilliantly portrayed by the fairly unknown actress Gretchen Mol...

Gretchen Mol a "fairly unknown" actress? Any Boardwalk Empire fan would quickly disagree with that characterization. She's been around forever.

Ray, I stand corrected...

I am a Boardwalk Empire fan, but I did not recognize her as Gillian Darmody...

A couple of viewer warnings:

Meade:

Even though it's incredibly well made, the words "fuck" and "shit" are occasionally uttered, so I'm sure you'd consider it to be absolutely vile and disgusting...

Strop:

Once again Hugh Laurie plays an American, which I know you find deeply offensive and automatically disqualifying as something you'd want to watch...

Me, I am strongly partial to performances where Hugh Laurie plays a piano.

snailgate

Here you go SG:





The guy has way more talent than one human being deserves...

I loved and recommend Good Girls Revolt, it's a fictionalized version of the true story of the women researchers of Newsweek (News of the World in the show) who had to bring a complaint at the EEOC to be allowed to become reporters. All 10 episodes are now available on Amazon prime and a second season has been ordered.

46 years after the complaint was filed, women still don't even fill an equal number of journalism jobs as men, and are still paid significantly less. Nationwide the wage gap is still significant, woman make on average 80% of what men make.

Excerpt of the Newsweek article on the show:

Updated | Fifty years ago, a man would have written this piece. I might have done research or helped report it, but a man would have written the words. While his career advanced, I might have been told to go somewhere else if I wanted to write, because “women don’t write at Newsweek.” This was the “tradition” for decades, until 46 women sued the magazine for gender discrimination in 1970.

Some women “came in with that consciousness. From the beginning they knew that this was not the way women should be in the world,” says Lynn Povich, one of the female staffers who filed the complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and fought for change. For the most part, though, “the men didn’t get it and the women didn’t get it."

Povich’s 2012 book, The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace, inspired the new Amazon series Good Girls Revolt. The pilot was released for Amazon’s “pilot season” last November. The full first season is due out on October 28.

In the 1960s, a woman’s career trajectory at Newsweek could include roles as a mail girl, clipper, researcher and reporter. But almost uniformly, that’s where it ended. Only men were hired or promoted to staff writer. Povich, an anomaly, became a junior writer while dozens of female colleagues remained in lower ranks. It wasn’t until 1969 when one researcher, Judy Gingold, learned from a friend of a friend who was a lawyer that this situation was actually illegal, violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, that the women began to organize secretly and sought an attorney. They found Eleanor Holmes Norton, then assistant legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, now a delegate to Congress for Washington, D.C., and always “smart, shrewd, and sharp-tongued,” as Povich writes in her book.

http://www.newsweek.com/good-girls-revo ... uit-512224

Another new show I would definitely recommend is Designated Survivor:

Keifer Southerland's latest vehicle:

A low-level Cabinet member becomes President of the United States after a catastrophic attack kills everyone above him in the Presidential line of succession.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5296406/

There are some superficial West Wing elements to it, but what it reminds me most of, is Mary McDonnell's President Laura Roslin from the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica...

A mild-mannered academic appointed to a low ranking cabinet position, who after an unimaginable catastrophe suddenly and unexpectedly finds themselves "in charge"...

And the need this responsibility creates for the character to rise to the occasion and become much more hard ass then they ever thought they could be...

DS is returning this week. Finally we'll find out who got shot.

Scooter wrote:DS is returning this week. Finally we'll find out who got shot.

I'm not surprised at how that played out...

I really like this show, I think it's certainly one of the better programs in current production...(it's well written, and its got a great cast)

But every now and then, (at key plot development points) it makes me wonder...

" Oh come on...How the hell could that happen?"

The first example of this was in the last episode before the series went on hiatus...

The barrel of the sniper's rifle of the assassin set up to murder President Kirkland, extends out the window from a high rise with a direct line of sight on the swearing in ceremony of the new Vice President, for a good three feet for an extended period of time with no one other than Agent Wells noticing it...

One would expect under these circumstances...(The Capitol blown up during a State Of The Union Address, a person 12th in line to the Presidency becoming President, a second attack on the White House when this new President was meeting with nation's governors...)

That security would be fairly intense... One would expect thousands of security personnel and police scanning every single inch of any building with a direct line of site on this ceremony...surely they would have noticed a three foot long sniper rifle barrel protruding from a window...

But I thought, okay, it's a well made show, maybe this one kind of odd incongruity was required to advance the plot, so just accept it...

But that was nothing compared to the end of the most recent episode...

(Warning: I'm going to try to avoid giving absolute spoiler info here, but there's some semi-spoiler info ahead...)




Please explain to me, how the wife of the Vice President Of The United States, could completely slip her Secret Service detail, get in her own car and then drive like a bat out of hell to Arlington Cemetery...

Where she could then hike her way across the cemetary without being noticed, and elude a battalion of FBI agents surrounding a meeting place in an obscure section of Arlington Cemetery, where her husband was meeting with a member of his old military unit...

So she could do what she came there to do without anyone stopping her...(that's the part where I won't give the spoiler)

I found that plot construction disappointing...

I guess none of that had a chance to enter my mind given the shock of watching what she did when she got there. Now THAT certainly did not figure into any of the possible outcomes I had imagined for that episode.

I just breezed past LJ's spoilers, but I'm thinking I might go back and give that show another look. Liked the first couple of episodes but then lost track of it and am now several episodes behind . . .

Scooter wrote:I guess none of that had a chance to enter my mind given the shock of watching what she did when she got there. Now THAT certainly did not figure into any of the possible outcomes I had imagined for that episode.

I agree with you on that point...I did not see that coming...

I thought The Traitor Vice President story arc would run through a few more episodes...

It's going to be very difficult to explain to the public what happened at Arlington Cemetery...