Modern Vespa

Me too

Sorry, man. Made me think of this.

Cinerama's Russian Adventure 1966

Spectacular footage shot with three cameras during Kruschev's tenure as Chairman. It's been restored, but you can occasionally see the seams where they put the films together. This was released in smilebox format, which tries to duplicate the original look of the Cinerama release on your home tv. It works most of the time. There is an intermission in the middle of the film.

This documentary from the Soviet Union was narrated by Bing Crosby. The footage was shot during the Kruschev era, and shows what is probably the high point of the Soviet Union. The sixties was a time when the Soviet Union and the West were fairly close technologically. The leader when this was filmed was Kruschev, who was by far the most Western leaning of the Soviet leaders prior to Gorbachev. This film humanizes the Soviets, and wants to make the point that they are a multicultural society that is more like us than different. There are reindeer races where people occasionally fall off the sleds, and trioka horse racing. Footage of Russian factories, Moscow traffic, whaling footage from Antarctica, opera, ballet, the circus, folk dancing companies, and a lot of spectacular landscapes from planes or helicopters. Visually stunning.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0219592/

nope

Neither TV nor movie, but tonite Mrs Syd and I went to the MIM* to see the (English) Beat. Fun show.

Did she win?

Only Murders in the Building Season 3 starts tonight

Currently watching Black List on Amazon Prime and The Last Ship on NOW TV

We Hunt Together seasons 1&2
The trailer doesn't do it justice

Only Murders in the Building, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Good Omens (season 2) and Beef.

It sounds silly, but we have been watching "Total Wipeout - UK" on Freevee. It dates back to the early 2010s and is hosted by Richard Hammond.

It's lots of brits bouncing off things into the water. And Richard Hammond.

It takes place in Buenos Aires, Argentina, presumably because they have less safety regulation than elsewhere.

Lots of laughs.

(ok, it's not tv/movie but anyway)

Yesterday Mrs Syd and I went to watch "Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose". To Bo honest, we are both fans of Simon Pegg and his longtime friend Nick Frost (think Paul, Shaun of the Dead, etc). Nandor Fodor is entertaining, though a bit slow, and much fake alcohol is consumed. No mongeese were harmed in the making of this film.

Just finishing up Netflix's Peaky Blinders for the 2nd time through it, but I think it might have 'Jumped The Shark' in the last half of season 5, but still visually impressive, with a lot of great actors.

Tonite, again at The Mim, Big Richard, an all female bluegrass band, with a cello. If they come to your town, I cannot recommend more highly. Great music, great fun.

Master Chef The Professionals, season 16 just started. This is how you up your game in the kitchen. It's like the US show that uses working chefs, but they aren't asked to make dishes out of a broom, two quarts of sour milk and a raccoon that is still running across the attic.
You can find this lovely show on eztv.re. If the show listed has a blue circle with an arrow through iit, you can stream it free of consequences. Don't download or inquire more about torrents and how to use them, and you''ll be fine. Amazing race Australia is also on EZTV, and it rocks.

This -

Really good silly fun

My son has Down syndrome. He's 27 and lives with us full time. We like to pop open the laptop and sometimes watch something at dinner. But we have to be careful what we expose him to because he has a tendency to fixate on "bad" things.

He also likes all things about real heroes, doctors, firefighters, police and the like.

Last night we watched the pilot episode of "CHiPs" from 1977.

I enjoyed it thoroughly.

It was OKish but I laughed my ass off when the big alien tripped and fell from the roof…

I'm watching Dark on Netflix. It's deliciously complicated.

Now watching Colony on Netflix and the excellent BBC documentary Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution

So that I can hopefully fool people into thinking that I'm a closet intellectual, I watch twenty minute YouTube videos on string theory and Einsteinian gobbledee-goop like time dilation or the exciting search for the Higgs Boson.

When not expanding my mind with high- minded cosmic unponderables, I gleefully binge-watch Tammy and Amy's drama-spiked episodes of '1000 Pound Sisters'.

When they're available, we'll also watch The Great British Baking Show with unbridled enthusiasm, though I can barely conceal my shameful lust for host Prue Leith when she wears blue-framed glasses.

The only network programming we watch are the local and national news between 5:00 and 6:00 PM.[/i]

I watched "Die Hard" again last night. Many will disagree, but it's a fun Christmas movie.

Why do I Think this is a Christmas movie? Well, it all happens on Christmas Eve ("Now I have a Machine Gun Ho-Ho-Ho").

But also, our protagonist - John McClain - has an epiphany to put aside his selfish ways and reconcile with his wife ("She's the best thing that happened to a bum like me").

Even the antagonist - Hans Gruber (played by the late, great Alan Rickman) - gets in on the act, proclaiming to fellow thief "It's Christmas Theo, It's a time of Miracles".

Please feel free to debate, but lets have fun with it.

I don't really feel the season until I hear "Feliz Navidad" or Paul McCartney's "Wonderful Christmastime". Then I know I'm truly in hell. It's even better than walking through Hobby Lobby in June to see elves on shelves.

I don't celebrate Christmas, but to each his own. But you gotta admit, everyone's wanted to punch Jose Feliciano at least once in their lifetime, right?

Great series.

Last week we saw Godzilla Minus One, from Japan, with subtitles. Really good movie, two thumbs up.

Season 3 of Slow Horses on AppleTV+. Great MI5 spy thriller.

I'm off to see this hopefully this week

Reacher. Season two

I've been watching Survivor and Amazing Race.

Amazing Race just ended. For the first time in several seasons I would have been OK with any of the three finalists winning. I did have my preferences, but was happy with the final outcome.

I've also enjoyed this season of Survivor. Only one of the players that I was wanting to win has been voted off, but it was done in a very strategic way, and the players that are left are ok.

My wife started watching Grey's Anatomy. She had seen a few clips on YouTube, which enticed her to watch the entire episodes that they were from. It was Season 6 or 7. I watched a few episodes with her one night. The next day when I came home she was on Season 1. She said she got bored with the storylines, and decided to start watching it from the start. We'd watched it when it was first broadcast almost 19 years ago, but stopped after Season 3.

It's well written, and decently acted, but the characters are just horrible people.

I've also been watching For All Mankind and Invasion on AppleTV+. I have Hello Tomorrow!, Silo, The Last Thing He Told Me, and Severance in my queue, as I've heard good things about all of them.

Survivor UK just ended, and it was pretty good. It was as long as the South African Version, if I remember correctly. If you haven't seen the Australian versions of both Survivor and Amazing Race, you've missed the best versions of those two shows. Survivor Australia is something like 52 days, and they let the contestants beat the hell out of each other during reward and immunity challenges. Amazing Race Australia has them doing extremely tough challenges too, compared to what they do in the US. Amazing Race Canada is basically the version of the Amazing Race that crosses Canada, back and forth, over and over again for nine seasons. There's a site called EZTV that you can find if you search with duckduckgo. A lot of the shows can be streamed right off the site, so you don't download and share any files.

HAH! All this new-fangled tv show stuff.

We don't watch a lot of tv. We've missed out on a lot of shows over the last couple of decades.

We just found "Alias". Yeah, yeah ... I know. Just finished the first episode this morning.

Typical early 2000s format. Welcome to confusion, here are some flashbacks, action scene, sad scene with soft independent artist's music in the background.

Coupled with flash bangs and enemy stormtroopers who can't hit a moose with a machine gun (ignore the plot holes as well) and you have the recipe for bubble-gum thriller tv that you don't have to think a whole lot about because they'll explain it all later.

Sadly, my impressions of Jennifer Garner have been sullied by my perception of her being she's one of the most adorable humans who has ever lived. I think I can get around it, though.

So, we put the "Castle" DVDs back in the case for another time.

I've seen clips of Survivor Australia on YouTube. There's one YouTube channel that I've watched where he's counted down the top 10/15/20 Villans/Heros/WTF Moments/Etc. in Survivor History, and there's usually a clip from the Australian version in the top 2 or 3 of the list.

As an aside, my wife HATES Survivor. She hates the contrived drama & competition. She hates the deus ex machina aspect of the hidden immunity idols.

We just finished the most recent season of Ink Master. To me, it was the worst season of them all. In previous seasons the challenges really did challenge the artists. They had to produce tattoos in pretty much all styles, and use a wide variety of techniques. This season they only did a small handful of styles. The guy who finished in 2nd place produced his first ever Black & Gray tattoo during the Final challenge. In previous seasons he would have done at least 3 or 4 during the previous challenges.

Also, I asked her last night, and she's over Grey's Anatomy.

Looking for something to watch, my wife picked out Bank Heist (Spanish) on Netflix. Not my style, but I often get pulled into stuff fairly easily. Not so much this. The writing kinda sucks, there doesn't seem to be one character I find appealing. But my wife has to see what happens, so we're still watching. My kid is on pretty much the same page as me, so my wife watches, kid and I keep one eye on it and offer up frequent criticisms of the script and flip out a bit when something really improbable happens...which is pretty often. Seriously, I'm disappointed they're killing off characters at such a snail's pace. I've volunteered to knock off a couple myself. Oh, yeah, and it runs 41 HOURS' FFS.

We got rid of the dubbing, which is a marginal improvement... those voices were grating too.

This is supposed to be high on the list for Netflix.

Went to see Ferrari last Sunday. Now, I'm not much of a movie goer, 1 a year or fewer. The only review I had seen was not great, but Mrs pigletpilot, a big movie fan, said to disregard that and make my own decision.
Glad I did. I enjoyed the movie with a couple of misgivings. They got a couple of historical bits wrong, and the CGI crashes struck me as a bit OTT with their outcomes. But not so bad as to spoil the movie. A good couple of hours of entertainment.

I think die hard is a great movie but I don't think of it as a "Christmas movie".

There is a connection to this heist that I read about in the late 80's in the newspapers. As an avid cyclist and motorcyclist I often thought that using the bicycle or motorcycle in rush hour was the best "getaway vehicle" for a bank robber type crime and these guys took it to the next level.

I wonder if the people that committed the crime were connected to the movie? I also suspect that the loss in the crime was insured, that the perpetrators may well have been the owners...they stole from themselves and laundered the money and collected on the insurance.

https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/San-Francisco-s-Perfect-Unsolved-Die-Hard-Crime-2715539.php

You also used to be able to find a lot more online about all of this but much of what I remember reading years ago is very hard to find for some reason. They can't erase the story entirely because of the movie but it seems like some stuff has been deleted? Interestingly enough bearer bonds were made illegal in US in 1982 six years before the theft in San Francisco.

I watched "Reality" last night. I thought it was good movie but I am interested in the story. My wife watched with me and she is not as interested in the story so she did not enjoy the movie as much as I did but it still kept her attention the entire time.

I am also a huge fan of " The Falcon and the Snowman ". I look at Christopher Boyce as a hero much like Snowden.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_John_Boyce

Even if you disagree with what these people did I think you have to acknowledge that they sacrificed their comfortable lives for what they thought was right and made public what the underhanded parts of the United States government wanted to keep secret.

Are you talking, by chance, about Money Heist, aka "La casa de papel"?

We loved the first season. After that, not so much.

Umm, yeah, my bad. For some reason I keep messing it up.

Yeah, the first season wasn't all bad, but it seems like every turn of the plot started annoying me.