Dumping Them Out: Severance
Welcome back to yet another episode of Dumping Them Out. This episode is brought to you by by the Zionist Christian Church of Africa. Are there people who find that to be a controversial group of people? How do they compare to Zionists in Israel? I have no idea. I did one Google search on what they stand for and didn't get a clear answer. But I saw their shoes and said "these guys rock".
Look at those bad boys. Just guys being dudes, worshipping Christ in their big shoes. I wonder if there's internal competition over who has the biggest shoes. If the bigger the shoes, the closer to god. The person in charge does seem to have the biggest ones. Or if there are more expensive brands of big shoe, or certain types of more expensive material. If I showed up with gigantic Yeezy's would I be laughed at, or would I be the coolest ZCC guy in all of Africa? What is it about the shoes that brings them closer to god? Are they for sale somewhere or do I have to make my own? I'm very interested in specifically the shoes aspect of their religion.
Love the show Severance. But Apple TV does themselves a massive disservice by releasing the new episodes on Friday. It's one of my all-time favorite series. Tons of people online talk about it. But they schedule their episodes to drop Friday at 3am EST. Then sometimes they'll randomly drop an episode on Thursday night. What I really wish is that they would release the entire season at once so I could binge the whole thing. But what's the point on doing the drop one episode a week thing if you aren't going drop them at a consistent time on a night where people are home, so they can capitalize on the publicity of having everybody watching at once, and talking about the show together online. Drop them Sunday at 9pm and people would watch it together like they do Game of Thrones. The way it is now, you get people watching it late on Thursday. Then they'll tweet about it, so on Friday you gotta avoid spoilers. Which people get mad about. If you have plans on Friday night, then you gotta wait until Saturday. Idk how the people at Apple TV could have got together and decided the way they're releasing episodes for Season 2 is the best thing for the show. Makes no sense to me. Apple TV just does an awful job marketing their shows overall.
This is weeks old, but since I'm talking about Severance, there was story that came out about the opening scene of the first episode of this season. Robbie Fox wrote a blog about it.
People who love filmmaking will see that and give praise for the attention to detail, and talk about the art of filmmaking. But that's objectively stupid. Spending 5 months on a 2:20 second scene that is barely even pertinent to the plot. They could have gotten the point of that scene across in 5 hours. No robots were required for that. Hollywood is so dumb sometimes. If you really want to go the extra step with the criticism, you can do the whole, "How many LA homes could have been rebuilt with the 5 months of money you spent on 2 minutes of episode 1?" I hate going down that road, because you can make that point about literally anything, and if you try to apply to everything you just end up inventing communism. But it's still stupid to brag about that. It's just praising inefficiency. I'd rather hear about the best show on television that took the least amount of time and money to film. The Blair Witch Project had a budget of $60k. They ended up completely stiffing their actors who made virtually zero royalties and no money off of it, which is a whole different story. But that's so much more impressive than Severance's stupid 5 month intro.
I saw the musical Hadestown on Friday night. I loved it. Beats out Moulin Rouge for best musical I've seen. If I could give a pretentious take, if you're a guy and you're 100% steadfast on "musicals are stupid", and say you could never enjoy one, you're just being stubborn. Some of them definitely suck. I saw one called Six, which is about the 6 ex-wives of King Henry VIII. That one stunk out loud. It was literally just 6 girls taking turns singing songs about what happened to them with a blank stage behind them. There was virtually zero acting. King Henry VIII wasn't even a character in the show. But in a musical like Hadestown, it's just extremely talented people acting out an original story in one take. With Hadestown I learned some stuff about Greek mythology. It's extremely impressive what production is able to do with so little space on stage. I can see how people wouldn't like some musicals. Even most musicals. But I see people just dismiss the entire genre, and that's ridiculous. People who are staunchly anti-musical are missing out on some legitimately great entertainment.